


Woman Borne

by fluffernutter8



Series: Bend Their Course [1]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (God that's like barely above "story is better than summary pls read" sorry), (not postapocalyptic or anything but darker deeds than in canon), Alternate Universe - Dark, F/M, Forced Pregnancy, Gen, Human Experimentation, Kid Fic, Kidnapping, Unwanted Pregnancy, but not the happy kind, mentions of Angie and Jarvis, mentions of Colonel Phillips and the Howling Commandos, not sexual assault but medical rape, slight body horror maybe?, somewhat handwavy history/science/logic, your enjoyment of this story is at least somewhat dependent on your suspension of disbelief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-07-26 14:18:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7577341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers was given a choice for his body to be used for science and service. Peggy Carter is given no such courtesy.</p><p>(Please read tags carefully for triggers and content.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Endless miles of thanks to nightlocktime who supported this story before she even knew what it was, and whose help and effort and advice and patience were the best and warmest I could ever have hoped for.
> 
> Story is finished (although if someone wants to look it over again, I'd be open to a secondary beta because I'm _really_ nervous about this one, people) and should have one chapter post a week.

They asked first. A meeting at the Pentagon, two men: one in uniform, stars on each shoulder, the other one in civvies, a scientist or a bureaucrat. Peggy in a neat suit rather than her uniform, hair and lipstick immaculate.

“We have a new project we're embarking on which we would like you to be a part of,” said the scientist. “Related to Project Rebirth. We think you would be perfectly suited for it.” There was something reptilian about him, wide-eyed and darting, dry but somehow slick at the same time. Skin flaked from the backs of his hands as he locked his fingers and stared at her across the tabletop.

“It has real promise in fighting those Reds. Would be an opportunity to help the country.” Not _your country_. It didn't matter. There was still a world to clean up, and Peggy was in the thick of it. She told them so. She mentioned nothing about fresh wounds or painful reminders. They shook hands. She left.

* * *

Six weeks later, Phillips was shot through the skull while taking meetings in Berlin. There were still Nazis floating about there, said the investigators, including snipers. Peggy attended his funeral.

“Hell of a thing,” Stark said to her afterward, and she knew what he meant. Their war was still at work, but Peggy realized for the first time that one day it would be out of people’s minds, with no one around to tell the stories. Stark himself was going to the far north, Alaska or deep into Canada, for weapons testing.

She hung a picture of Phillips on her wall, hammering the nail herself.

* * *

Two more funerals over the next year. Falsworth first, a car accident. She couldn't get time off to make the trip, but she sent condolences. Then Dugan. She found out about that on the subway. The man in front of her turned over the page of his newspaper and beneath the small headline _Home Invasion Strikes Fear in Quiet Community_ was a picture of a disordered bedroom with an unmistakable bowler hat discarded by the bed. Peggy felt a chill in the backs of her knees and the soles of her feet. The meeting with the men from the Department of War didn’t enter her mind, but she understood that someone was hunting.

She went to the funeral the next afternoon, veiled, as if it would help. She gave herself one day afterward, thinking she had time, got messages to Jones and Morita and Dernier, gave Angie a hug over one last slice of pie, squeezed Mr. Jarvis’s hand quickly. Her work was forgotten in the face of this. She could disappear. It would be fine.

She was hit with a tranquilizer three blocks from the diner.

* * *

They waited until she was fully awake to explain. That was a mistake. She broke two noses, an ankle, several teeth and someone’s index finger before the drugs had even cleared her system.

They still caught her, though, in the end.

They called it Project Birth. The creation of an American super-soldier from the ground up.

“We think you will be the best carrier,” said a man in a white coat. He was no one she had met with before, but Peggy had the pieces now: she had not wanted to give herself to them, the scientist and the soldier, so they had taken her.

She brought up the recently publicized incidents of Nazi involvement in similar plans. She mentioned her right to counsel, her right to her embassy. It was civilized, for the illusory moment.

“Miss Carter,” said the scientist, “I think you will find that your service to this effort outweighs these ideals.”

What Peggy understood was this: there were men who would burn everything to satisfy their urge to play God. This had little to do with making the perfect spy, the model assassin to sneak into Soviet territory. It was lies and ego and power, and she was trapped in it.

* * *

She made herself choke on her dinner that night, sliding to the floor, catching the handler in her room off-guard. She avoided capture for an hour, left ten men incapacitated behind her. That was when she found out quite how far underground they were, and just how many people’s attentions were devoted only to her.

They began to sedate her after that anyway. There was something in that which she might label satisfaction.

* * *

A single vial of blood was not the only thing left of Steve Rogers. They showed her the specimen cup, one of several handed out to various scientists after the successful transformation. Most had given up on isolating the serum or its components and discarded theirs; after all, if blood held no answers, why would semen?

Lying on the table, Peggy had a brief, horrible vision of Steve masturbating awkwardly into this cup years ago. Embarrassment clawed at her throat. A doctor leaned toward her, the smell of soap and unexpectedly warm hands. She could barely move her mouth.

“He would have never wanted this,” she managed. “Never.”

The doctor said nothing. Everything was too much, and not enough.

* * *

It worked on the second try. They confirmed it three weeks later. Two doctors shook hands. No one spoke to Peggy. It was probably for all of their benefit; she might have bitten them if they had tried to congratulate her. She could imagine blood in her mouth, bone cracking between her teeth.

They would not be allowed to sedate her as much anymore.

Peggy planned.

* * *

She knew the ways women tried to do this. There were no chemicals accessible. They allowed her books, paperbacks only, and certainly no knitting needles or crochet hooks. She ate her meals with a spoon and it was taken back afterward. She was given short, partially supervised showers, and took walks around and around a large room, an attendant at her elbow all the time.

There were chinks. There always were.

* * *

They changed nurses frequently. It’s what Peggy would have done. Harder to organize, but harder to form connections as well. Not that the ones they did have were particularly easy to connect with. Most were hard-faced, broad-shouldered women who reminded Peggy of her boarding school sports instructor.

There was one who kept coming back. She was older than Peggy by about ten years, and very close to deaf. It must have made the men in charge grow complacent about her, sure that she could cause no harm, do no damage, because she was damaged. Peggy took the opposite view: someone who had struggled to get to this point, who had overcome when no one thought she could, was someone very brave.

They traded names. The nurse was called Abigail. She knew very little about why Peggy was there, why any of them were there. Peggy made sure she knew everything. She hoped it would be enough.

* * *

She woke one morning with Steve’s voice, warm and content and loving, full of wonder, still settled over her like a shroud.

_“What have we got in here, Peg?”_

And she shuddered and could not stop because she didn’t know what would be worse: a small soldier boy, raised for combat, or a little girl who would likely one day end up in Peggy’s same bed.

* * *

She attempted escape repeatedly. Once she almost made it outside; she heard a doctor hiss it to a nurse later. The next time she didn’t get as far, and she ached as she heard voices getting closer, because she knew now where the end was and she could not reach it.

She turned and peered down the tall staircase she had just climbed and thought about how careless that was, having one of those there. She was unwieldy by then, but she balanced delicately and placed one foot forward. She tried to make herself fall.

After they found her and brought her back to her room, she replayed it in her mind over and over and always. She had understood in that moment why they had thought it had to be her. It was not just a matter of her health and her quick mind, the things that had made her a good agent reduced only to good material to mix with their super-soldier. It was that they thought that someone else they chose- someone homeless, someone institutionalized, who would be docile, who they could make disappear- would not protect the last piece of Steve Rogers the way that Peggy Carter would.

They were wrong. What she thought as she tried to fall was that she wanted to live, just her. She wanted to protect the last piece of Peggy Carter.

* * *

They made her labor. She wanted them to cut her open, but was not surprised when they would not. When the mechanical command came to push, she nearly refused the voice and her body. Pushing would finish things, though.

It was large. It was healthy. It cried, a more full-throated sound than anything Peggy had heard in months.

Abigail held it bundled near Peggy’s head later. Abigail who left doors open, who was just a touch too slow on rounds, who let Peggy shower for longer than necessary and brought small candies and, once, a pale flower. Who drew her blood, who kept the secret.

“Would you like to give her a name?” Abigail asked softly.

Peggy knew that it should be Sarah. In another life, it would have been Steve asking the question, hushed, jubilant, and this would have been their Sarah. In the life Peggy imagined most, it was just the two of them, working and laughing in love. But it was this life, and Peggy stared until Abigail turned her face, shamed that she had given only small braveries.

* * *

Part of her felt like she could surely have avoided this. She was Peggy Carter, brainy and brave and breathless. Peggy Carter with her lipstick smile and bare knuckles. Surely she was better than this.

But somehow all the things she was were not enough. The world was small now and she could not rescue herself from within it.

* * *

There were things that Peggy had not even known she could miss: slicing apples, newspapers, the moon and rain, handshakes, calendars.

She did not know when it was anymore as a man in uniform came in.

“Unfortunately the project is no longer seen as a priority. We hope to return to it at a later time. You will, of course, be cared for until then.”

He stared at the wall over her shoulder as he spoke and she suddenly missed Phillips with a throbbing violence.

They no longer sedated her. They had forgotten why they once had.

They scrubbed the blood from beneath her fingernails and between her teeth later, but she could still hear the sound of the bone and the scream when she thought about it, and it made her smile.

* * *

She fought on the way to the tank, drawing blood again despite the drugs, leaving men on their knees with nothing but curses and whimpers in their mouths. But there were far more of them and they tucked her inside anyway. There was a second tank, smaller, beside hers, already closed.

Two tanks in a back room with a dozen other crates. She wasn’t awake when they locked the door behind them.

(Years later, she would watch _Indiana Jones_ , which she would actually very much enjoy. The final scene, the Ark of the Covenant disappearing into overwhelming rows of secrets and banalities, would make her vomit.)

* * *

While Peggy Carter slept, Howard Stark returned. He looked for her. He started SHIELD. He hammered her picture into place himself. He was killed on an empty road.

While Peggy Carter slept, HYDRA rooted itself deeper.

While Peggy Carter slept, people began to whisper about the Winter Soldier.

While Peggy Carter slept, the world moved on.

While Peggy Carter slept, Steve Rogers woke


	2. Chapter 2

Nick Fury gave Steve the files. He saw Steve frown as he read the designations: “Missing,” “Killed.” He saw it as anger, sadness, disappointment, resignation.

Nick Fury did not know Steve. Nick Fury might be forgiven.

* * *

Steve found people to talk to: a nephew of Morita's, Dernier's granddaughter. They told the same story, handed down in quiet family rooms when years had passed and it had been deemed safe for Steve’s remaining comrades to return to their lives: Peggy Carter called and said to be alert. Peggy Carter never called again.

He finally found Jones, hidden in plain sight in upstate New York. He'd been called Abe Jones for over sixty years by then.

“Carter said,” and Steve could remember a hundred nights of Gabe relaying messages, hunched over a crackling radio, “that someone was tracking. She said to look out and that she was going away.”

“Do you think she made it?”

Jones sighed. “Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think she got away and stayed hidden, keeping the world running from underground. But I wonder often enough if they got her that I've never taken my name back.”

Steve nodded. He leaned forward, elbows sharp against his thighs. “They killed Phillips and Monty and Dum Dum to get to her.”

“Yes,” said Jones, and Steve felt a chill in the small of his back and beneath his breastbone. “Power and proximity. The people who would have helped her. I don't know if it was meant to be all of us in the end, but it was definitely Carter.”

* * *

Steve went for the scientists next. He asked Natasha to find him records, trying to make it seem idle and unimportant, like he was looking for information on himself. Later, when he understood computers better, he did it on his own.

Steve wasn’t in the habit of threatening old men. Most of the time he didn’t need to. He would sit in their living rooms and stare at them, trying to see if he would have known them when they were young, and they would glance away from him and talk. “Following orders,” they would say. “A different time, didn’t know any better.”

And Steve would stand in his young-old body and say, “Right and wrong are the same in any time.”

The last man had hands with dry, cracking backs and sweaty palms. “The project worked to an extent,” he said, tone that of an easy report to a colleague. Steve locked himself inside. “But it was taking too long so we tried to preserve things for the future. Never came to anything, but they should actually be right where we left them, assuming the government still pays the power bill.”

Steve’s brain didn’t know where to go first with that: the idea that this man could just dismiss people as things, or that he might go there and find nothing living after all this time.

“Where did you leave them?” he asked, trying not to think of all the broken things in his life.

The scientist raised an eyebrow. He coughed a little. “It’s quite a way.”

Steve looked down at his hands and then back up. The muscles in his jaw worked themselves. Shadow drifted over his eyes. For the first time, the man looked away. “I’ve already come quite a way.”

* * *

Natasha came with him to the Arizona desert between SHIELD assignments. They’d been partnered often by then, enough that he trusted her.

(Or that’s what he told himself. The truth was that he was a crap liar and she knew enough about his investigations that he was pretty sure she would have followed him. But he was also pretty sure she hadn't said anything to Fury, and for now that was enough.)

“This place has all the charm,” she said when they found it, a small building surrounded by government-owned sand. Steve forced the door open. The air was still but he could hear the faint hum of electricity. They stepped in and deep, deep down.

Steve had always thought that it was the crowded, sick-smelling hospitals that he hated more than anything, but this place with its white, white endlessness, gleaming and scentless, was infinitely worse. They peered into a dozen rooms, neat and untouched, without any sign that anything at all had happened there. The whole place was like an unmarked grave in a forgotten field.

“Don’t think about it,” Natasha said flatly. She opened another door.

“Right,” said Steve, and pretended that he could stop.

The room where they found them looked like a large closet. “Whoa there,” said Natasha, watching Steve’s fists pressing together.

Steve’s voice was rough. “Just help me get them out.”

“I don’t think we should.” Natasha held up her hands. “I just mean...we don’t know enough about what’s been keeping them alive in there. Shouldn’t mess around with that.”

She was probably right. Steve tried very, very hard not to be an idiot about it all. He still wanted to scream the entire time they were attaching generators and unearthing elevators and driving the two days back to New York. While Steve drove, Natasha catnapped in the passenger’s seat. When it was Natasha’s turn, Steve sat crouched in the back of their rented truck. He wanted to press his face into his palms, but instead he kept watch.

* * *

Steve asked Dr. Banner for help.

“It looks like early cryonics technology. Suspended animation,” he said as he walked around the new centerpiece of Steve’s living room. He looked over at Steve. “You know that Tony would be better for this kind of thing.”

“Don’t tell him,” Steve said. He knew that it was probably breaking a trust, and he didn’t care. Things were better between them, but he didn’t want Tony Stark coming in with his engineer's flash and his loud voice and his headlines. He wanted Bruce Banner, his gentle, assured hands, his knowledge of what it felt like to be out of control.

Bruce evaluated him. “Alright.”

“How do I get them out?”

Bruce’s face made a shrug. “Just looking at it? I couldn’t tell you. I have no idea how advanced the work was or what preparations went into this thing, how they were preserved. We might open them up and they’ll be fine. They might need a boost of something- glucose, who knows. Or it might just be…”

“Too much time.” Bruce looked away as Steve’s voice broke.

“What if you had manuals and medical records?” Natasha didn’t even lean out of the shadows as she spoke.

Bruce and Steve traded glances. “That would be helpful, yeah.”

“They’re in the truck.” She tossed Steve the keys. “Under the passenger seat.”

They were. Two boxes of neat files that Steve had never seen before. He couldn’t remember being separated from Natasha for more than two minutes the entire time they were in Arizona. Steve decided that he was giving up being surprised by anything anymore.

“You know,” said Banner later, as he prepared to leave, “it’s been an interesting week for old science.” He pulled a newspaper from his bag. _Congress probes decades-old human experimentation allegations_ below the fold, with a small photo of an old man leaving a suburban house, a police officer on either side. His eyes didn’t meet the camera. The detail was not fine enough to catch the flecks of dry skin skimmed onto the handcuffs.

“Must be something in the air,” Steve replied blandly.

* * *

Peggy kept her eyes closed when she woke up. She regulated her breathing. She took stock of temperature, smells, sounds.

There was music playing quietly, a French song that Peggy remembered discussing with Gabe Jones on a cold night somewhere in a warzone. She slitted her eyes open very carefully.

Steve was sitting next to her bed. She could see how carefully he had placed everything: lights on but not too bright, the room neat, his chair far enough not to crowd but near enough for her to reach over and touch.

Impossible. Obviously. All of it.

He was awake, watching her. She had remained still and seemingly asleep, but she suspected from his flickering eyes that he wasn’t fooled. He kept motionless, waiting for her to speak.

She glazed her eyes instinctively around the room for a weapon. It was just him there, but she wasn’t sure of her muscles at the moment.

She lay there for another few minutes before he spoke.

“You’re safe.” It was said casually, but with something warm and fragile and bloody underneath.

“I’m not sure I know that.”

“I understand.”

She almost laughed at that. Too perfect, all of this. The sun through the curtains, and Steve sitting kindly beside her bed, so easily alive. A tiredness came over her. The thought of all that living, perhaps. Ridiculous, really, because one shouldn't be able to get tired in nice dreams.

“I'm afraid I'm not at my best, Captain.”

“You shouldn't've said anything. You always look pretty perfect to me. I was fooled.”

She put out a hand to touch his. He grasped at her fingers, mindfully gentle as always. She wondered for a moment if this all might be real.

She could feel herself drifting away again. Just as she did, she saw him place a small pistol on the nightstand. “In case you want it when you wake up.”

Peggy smiled into her sleep. Too perfect. Obviously.

* * *

“You seem well.” It was night, some time later. Steve had brought her a bowl of porridge oats despite it being a strange choice for the hour. She was eating gingerly. This achy, overwhelming fatigue seemed like another thing that shouldn't feature in nice dreams.

“I brought the plane down pretty far north. The ice kept me preserved until they found me and dug me out.”

She rested her spoon in her bowl and looked over at him. “It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?” There were only subtle clues- the blanket seemed to be some kind of synthetic, the lamp was strange, Steve’s shirt and trousers were slightly unfamiliar in style, the sounds of traffic outside were louder and altered- but the writing she could see was in English, and there was no futuristic city skyline visible from the window, just familiar brick. Still, there was a sense of distance traveled about him that was more than the tired shadows below his eyes.

Steve nodded slowly. “Almost seventy years.” He swallowed. “I’ve only been awake for around one.”

“Have we developed those flying cars Howard was always so set on?”

“No,” said Steve. His eyes were on her face. “We’re still pretty firmly terrestrial. With some exceptions.” He rubbed a hand against his forearm. “I have to say that your reactions to all of this are definitely calmer than mine were. I expected to be on the floor long before now.”

Peggy licked at her spoon a bit, getting the last of the cinnamon off. Steve’s pupils magnified just slightly; she probably wouldn’t have noticed had his eyes been darker. As it was, she was somewhat gratified that things finally seemed to be moving away from the simple domesticity portion of the dream, although she did wish he would stop looking quite so serious. “It seemed foolish to dwell on whatever imagined reasoning there might be for this. No use trying to understand dream logic.”

“You think this is a dream?” It hadn’t had the desired effect in regards to lessened seriousness. His forehead furrowed into a deeper frown.

“Consider for a moment. At last check, you had crashed a Nazi plane in an unknown location and were missing, presumed dead. We had moved from a conflict which injured and killed thousands on the battlefield to one which would be more subtle and could still have the same consequences. We had added into the mix a weapon of our creation that had devastating effects and had the potential to repeat them. I was trying to remind people that I could hand them their arses while still holding a cup of tea, without very much success. And then I spent some time in circumstances which were...rather unpleasant.” She paused, rubbing a thumb on the rim of her bowl before looking up at him with bright eyes. “Now you’re sitting there, whole and healthy, telling me that it’s seventy years later and the world is still standing. There isn’t a war on. You’ve given me a weapon. So, yes, it all bears resemblance to a dream.”

Steve’s mouth worked a little. “Is there anything I can do to convince you otherwise? We have technology that I can show you.”

“That’s a nice offer.” She waved a hand. “But I think that my imagination is fairly capable of coming up with ideas for futuristic gadgets, especially after spending time around Howard.”

“So I’ll never be able to prove to you that this is real?”

“We can just wait and see.”

Steve leaned further back in his chair. There was a knock at the door, a terse sort of sound, as if whoever was knocking wasn’t entirely used to doing so and was forcing herself into the courtesy.

Steve said, “Come in,” not raising his voice and still watching Peggy. The woman who opened the door had strangely bright coppery hair and was dressed in muted colors, in items of clothing that Peggy didn’t recognize. Or rather, she knew what they were- a jacket, a blouse, trousers that looked closer to being tights- but they were versions she hadn’t thought could exist, stretchier and smoother and closer-fitting than she had ever seen anyone wear, even in the field.

Despite what she had just said to Steve, she had thought that waiting would take longer.

“I know you got yourself a doctor’s note, but they just called me in,” said the woman, not even glancing at Peggy. Her voice was stripped down, husky.

“Go,” said Steve, finally glancing away from Peggy, just for a moment. He was always very careful about eye contact. “Thanks, Natasha.”

Natasha nodded and left. Peggy took stock again, the dream theory called into serious question. She didn’t think she would have imagined Natasha. She looked down at her bowl and let her eyes drift a bit, ensuring the gun’s steady presence. She needed to check if it was loaded.

“Is Natasha your-”

“No.” She appreciated that firmness. No misunderstandings there. He had learned that lesson. “My colleague.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to have been taking up anyone’s bed.”

His cheeks flushed, high, by the bone. “Just mine.”

“All well and good, then.” She shifted away as soon as she said it. Shouldn’t get too comfortable. “Where do you and Natasha work?”

“SHIELD. Howard started it out of the old SSR.”

“To do what?”

“Er...”

She laughed at his sheepishness. “Just saving the world, ma’am?”

“Sometimes it needs it,” he shrugged. His shrug was one of the things that reminded her most of his smaller frame. It looked bony, even with the graceful muscles he now had.

“Is that where you found me? On a mission to save the world?”

“No. I was looking. I looked for you. Since I woke up. I figured...everyone needs help, at least once.”

There was that look he used to give her, the one that said that he saw her, fast and fearless, better than everyone by half, and still human. She had missed that look. She wanted very badly to believe it all.

Her muscles would hold her now. The gun was nearby if needed.

Natasha had left the door opened slightly. A sound muffled its way in, not a cry, just a fretful little whine. Clearly a baby.

She never would have dreamed that. Peggy believed.

* * *

Steve did not stand, but his fingers tightened on the arms of his chair.

“Go ahead,” Peggy told him. Her voice sounded exactly like it always did, the words marching out easily.

“I’ve heard plenty of babies crying worse and longer.” There was a tenement sort of grimness to his voice that spoke of gritting teeth through long winters. “She’s in a crib. She’ll be fine without me for now.” The implication was clear: _you won’t_.

“Well I’m going to the toilet, so you’ll need to do something while I’m in there.” The baby made another sound, an irritated cough, just once. Peggy saw it crack across Steve’s face. With anyone else she would think that it was coldness or politeness, that he had already chosen and was only staying to make himself feel better. But it was Steve. He wanted to sit beside her and not leave, and he wanted to help a crying child, and he wanted the two things equally. It left him at war with himself. It left them all at war with each other.

She got out of the bed on her own. He had helped her each time before; now that she didn’t think this was imagined, she found herself embarrassed by that. Steve stood up and went to the door that led to the rest of the apartment.

“Promise me,” he said, as she stepped into the bathroom. His hand clenched around air. His voice shook. “Promise me you won’t do anything to yourself.”

The crying was louder now. She waited for him to go, but he stood, a tremble along his shoulders, and stared at her. Peggy held up her open palms. “Of course not.”

* * *

When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw strange-familiar marks around her waist and legs and breasts, and realized that she had grown accustomed to a body that was so deeply changed she had not even thought to look for changes **.** She gripped at the sink, her hair falling dark against the porcelain.

She was gone by the time Steve came back, the apartment quiet again. The curtains swayed at the edges from the open window. The pistol was no longer on the nightstand.

* * *

She disappeared for eighteen days. Steve didn’t even try to pretend he wasn’t going out of his mind.

* * *

She'd left in a nightgown with a pistol in her hand. When she came back, she wore neat slacks and a blouse. He didn't see a weapon, but he thought he might find a holster somewhere if he could touch her.

Steve wasn't surprised by any of it.

“Hi.” He closed the door behind him. She was sitting on his couch, knees firm, ankles crossed. The blankets he had been using were folded at the opposite end. He hadn't taken his bed back.

“Hello.” She looked very clearly at Steve's face and nothing else. “Out walking?”

“Uh...yeah. We've been doing that. I figured all the time inside couldn't be healthy for her.” He had sent Natasha about eight texts and left one stream of consciousness voicemail trying to decide between getting a stroller (could be pushed to the side in the event of a fight but might roll too far) or a baby carrier that strapped onto his chest (kept her close but could put her in danger if it was hand to hand). She'd replied late the next evening, once she was back in New York and after Steve had already gone out for the first time, the two of them in hats, Steve wearing dark glasses, and the baby snug against him: _wtf cap??_

“Yes, I imagine the fresh air does some good.” He heard the brittle crumbling of her voice beneath the polite lady-of-the-manor tone.

“If I go put her in her bed, will you still be here?”

There was added steel in her voice when she said yes, but he wasn’t sure if it was for him or for her.

He’d gotten the hang of the carrier to bed transfer by now. She liked it when he hummed lullabies, the Irish ones he remembered more from neighborhood ladies when he was a teenager than from his own mother. He looked around the room for a moment after she had settled, and then went back to where Peggy was still sitting. For the first time he was a little embarrassed by his place, the worn patches in his old gray-green couch, the small dining table cluttering up the living room. It had windows, but each with its own lovely view of Brooklyn’s finest fire escapes and alleys. He shook himself. Peggy had never cared about any of that, and there had been a time when he had imagined bringing her back to an apartment smaller and shabbier than this.

“I would think that after all this time, you would have to be back at work,” she said as he brought himself over to sit beside her. “Have you become a slacker, Captain?”

“I’m on psych leave.”

“Psychotherapeutic leave? Why?” She had always been good at looking accepting of new information, but he could see shock there, and wariness.

“I couldn’t ask for time off without it looking suspicious- I’ve never done it before. I couldn’t get hurt enough to put myself on the bench and still be mobile. So I got a little rough in an interrogation.” He forced himself not to tense. “They were bad guys,” he assured the two of them. “Really bad guys.” Bad guys who had been handcuffed. “It was pretty out of character so I got a month off. ‘Too much time in the field.’ I don’t like the precedent, but I needed the out.”

Peggy almost seemed like she was going to touch him. He tried not to let on how much he wanted it, but didn’t think he had succeeded. “Is it really so important to keep me a secret that you couldn’t have just said something?”

“I trust my team with my life,” said Steve. “But Peg, you were grabbed off the street by people from my government, people who had no business looking at you sideways. And I don’t-” He made a twitchy, helpless gesture. “I can’t let something like that happen again. I’d never try to stop you from saying something if you wanted, but until you say otherwise, anything I know comes with me to the grave.”

Peggy nodded. “Where did you go?” Steve asked after several quiet moments.

“Around. The library, for a while. Visited Jones.”

Steve gave a soft snort. “Took me two months to track him down. And I knew how to use the internet.”

“They have books on it, you know. And the library offered a free course. I figured that out fairly quickly.”

“Of course you did.” Steve rubbed his palm against the side of his leg, distracting himself so his hand wouldn’t try anything tricky like holding hers or wrapping itself around her shoulder.

“Jones told me,” said Peggy carefully, “that he went looking, years after I’d gone, but he couldn’t find me.”

Steve nodded. “They had you buried pretty...” He cleared his throat, tried again. There was still hollowness. “Pretty deep.”

“There was no need to think about letting me out,” Peggy said, voice very low, body turning bitter. “They already had what they wanted.”

“Did you ever…With her?” He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.

“What? Have a cuddle? Tell stories about Mummy and Daddy? No, Steve. I barely looked more than I could avoid.” Her tone was venomously even. “I never particularly wanted children. It was something of an inevitability, given the time, but I was hoping to be the exception. Now it seems I’m only exceptional in the fact that I’m the kind of person who despises her own child.”

“Do you expect me,” said Steve. His voice sounded worse, shakier, because of her flatness. “Do you expect me to blame you for that?”

“Hating a child. That seems to be the generally held barometer for evil.”

The anger filled Steve up; it always had, no matter what his size. He wanted to lash out, to eliminate the people who had done this. He said, with a coldness that he didn’t think he had ever used around her before, “Don’t be absurd. You were kidnapped and forced to have a baby. People have destroyed themselves and everyone around them over less.”

He had never said it like that to her. Maybe she hadn’t even thought of what had happened to her that way. Her face spasmed. “I still have time.”

“I’m here to stop that from happening.” He was rarely anything but plain with Peggy, partially because he could not avoid it. But now he wanted his safe, easy voice, his Captain America presence, to fill the room. Even in the smallness of the apartment he fell short. “I’ll be here, Peggy. We’re both here now.”

“So is she.”

They were the kind of words that made everything stop, that made everything enhanced. The background noises- water in the pipes and the neighbors across the hall and quiet baby breathing- became prominent. He was overwhelmed by the light smell of Peggy’s curls, the lotion she had on her hands.

“I can’t give her away,” said Steve softly, his heart everywhere. “Natasha got me a fake birth certificate and medical records, so I took her to the pediatrician, and she seems fine, but she might be like me.” Even he didn’t know what he meant by that: small and sickly, needing attention and investment that an adoptive family might not be willing or able to provide, or abnormal and powerful and altered, better off around people who understood.

Whichever it was, it didn’t mean that he loved Peggy any less.

And maybe she saw that in his face, that he wanted to have and hold, to protect and serve, that he was trying to grip it all at once, because she nodded. “I can’t be around her,” Peggy said. Her stiff upper lip had returned. “But I would still like to see you. I’m given to understand that I’ll need several items in the way of background and paperwork in order to find a home and a job. Can you acquire them for me?”

Steve nodded. “I’ll need a few days.”

“I’ll be back, then.” She stood. She didn’t try to shake his hand and he was grateful.

As she got to the door, she spoke again, to the wood rather than to him. “Did you...what do you call her?”

“Natasha told me I couldn’t keep calling her ‘little girl.’ I’ve been using Ella.”

“Why?”

He felt his mouth soften, sliding closer to the smile that meant he had gotten away with something, the one she used to call cheeky. “It means little girl.”

He couldn’t see any of her face, couldn’t even guess at her tone as she said, “Take care, Steve,” and was gone.

Steve sat in the silence of the apartment. He looked at his hands. So much strength in him now and when it came to something this important all useless, useless.

* * *

Once, about half a year after he’d come out of the ice, Steve had come up from the subway and seen down the street a group of people yelling at a young woman who was trying to walk into a building.

“There are other ways,” said a broad-bodied man.

The cottony lady beside him, her face red, screamed,“You’re damning three souls to hell. Yours, the butcher who will do this, and that innocent you’re carrying.”

“It’s a gift from God.” Steve saw the young woman’s face contract despite her best efforts as the priest spoke. “You have to accept that.”

The woman turned at that. “This isn’t a gift from anyone. This is something my stepfather left on my doorstep,” she spat. “And I don’t have to accept anything.”

Steve admired it, that refusal to give up her dignity, her control of the situation. He probably wouldn’t have stepped in, but someone threw something and he was just there, a shirtfront in his fist. He let it go and walked beside the woman, angling himself over her until she got into the lobby.

When she thanked him, he just shook his head. He felt exhausted by the ways of people, and he thought that maybe she did too. He waited for her to come out; he couldn’t imagine walking back through that again.

Right before the doors she turned to him. “I just got into college. I want to be a nurse.” She gave a laugh that sounded like it might bubble into a sob. “Neonatal or pediatrics. I love kids. But I couldn’t…”

“Can I give you a hug?” The words were out before he could stop them. They had felt like the only thing to say, and the exact wrong thing at the same time. Still, she nodded, and he put gentle arms around her. “You’re strong enough for this,” he had said, helpless, hopeful, reaching for the right words. She muffled an affirmative sound against him, and then stepped away, pushing open the door again.

Now, he felt the same absence of words. He couldn’t understand what had happened to Peggy, not truly. He could imagine and he could punch bags until he stood panting with raw hands, he could ache and he could stand by her side, but he could not _know_ in blood or body or brain.

He hated how it had all happened. He could understand why Peggy hated their daughter. He hoped she could understand why he didn’t.


	3. Chapter 3

Peggy found a flat. It was small- one square kitchen-lounge-bedroom as opposed to the boxy, densely packed rooms of Steve’s apartment- but she was still accustomed to the wartime routine of hastily acquired and abandoned beds, and didn’t have much in the way of belongings to fill it up anyway. Steve had warned her about prices these days, and she had some experience from her wanderings around New York, but she still found her breath taken from her when she was told the rent, even for such tiny accommodations as hers.

She found a job, too, waitressing at a café. She had thought at first to look for something quieter for while she got her bearings, in a bookstore or an office, perhaps, but had realized she had missed nearly three quarters of a century of literature and technology. Waitressing hadn’t changed much and would do for the time being, as she gathered herself and planned further.

Steve’s friend Natasha helped her with a resume and references.

“I expect Steve will have already thanked you,” Peggy said afterward, “but I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your help. I assume that we’ll owe you multiple favors from this whole affair.”

Natasha had watched her for a moment, crown tilted just slightly. “The thing with Cap is that it isn’t about balance,” she said. “I know that he would help me, regardless of anything.”

“That’s true.” Peggy felt oddly touched on Steve’s behalf.

A grin slunk onto Natasha’s face then. “Still doesn’t mean I won’t call in a favor if the time comes for it.”

The pub was a small one, low light and wood paneling. She suspected they hired her less because of Natasha’s forgery than because her accent matched the aspirant ambiance. Her foreignness provided something of a cover as well. When she was shown the various technologies even a small restaurant seemed now to rely upon, she told her new manager, Tina, that her old post had been very old fashioned.

“Like Medieval Times?” Tina asked, showing her quickly how things were done, and Peggy had said yes, although she suspected that the image she had in her head was not the same as the one in Tina’s.

Steve came over at least twice a week. Always on Tuesday and Friday evenings, sometimes more often. She had a portable telephone now, a device that made her think about how things might have been different during the war, and he would call or text her before.

He was always alone. She never asked who was left at his apartment- Natasha, or some neighbor- and he never said.

They would talk, the two of them. Catching up on people and events, asking questions. Her guard came down around him; she didn’t have to worry that she was saying the wrong thing, or not understanding something crucial, something that everyone around her took for granted. She did her own research, of course, but having Steve there for explanations from a perspective that she understood was helpful. He knew her references, songs and film actors and historical events that were obscurities now. Things that had been so important in their time, battles that had been life or death for people she knew, were forgotten by everyone but them.

They spent time familiarizing themselves with popular culture as well. They had each started lists, and would trade off choosing things to watch or read or listen to. Steve’s list was longer, Peggy’s more obscure thanks to the range of people she met daily. She wouldn’t have said that she enjoyed it all- some of the music involved far too much screaming than singing for her taste, and the films were more casually gory, making her wonder whether they were made by people who had been to war and been numbed by it, or if the fighting had simply become something soaked into national consciousness- but it was at least interesting for the most part.

There were some notable exceptions. Watching Steve looking entranced at several cartoon movies, trying to understand the leaps between Snow White which he had seen in a Brooklyn theater in 1938 and these bright, life-like figures, was a highlight. One the other hand, a viewing of a film called Deep Throat, which they had assumed was related to the presidential scandal they had read about from the 1970s, ended abruptly with a red-faced Steve firmly crossing off the entry in his notebook, muttering about never taking Tony Stark’s advice about anything again.

Steve would occasionally talk about Stark and Natasha and his other colleagues. He showed her footage from the battle in Manhattan, chaotic glimpses of extraterrestrials and fire and Steve’s familiar shield.

“Well,” she said, swallowing. “It seems that things have changed from the days of Hitler and one rogue red-faced Nazi.”

Steve shook his head. “Look who’s helping.” He tapped the computer screen they were watching on. “Bus drivers and sales clerks and people walking on the street. Look at the cops, armed with useless guns but refusing to give up ground. We got this footage from the news; people stood with cameras in the middle of it all because they thought it needed to be recorded.” He shrugged. “Hope, bravery. Those things don’t change.”

She leaned against him then. She was always the one initiating touch. It was something he was very mindful of. He had become less formal in her presence, knees and elbows expanding outward as he sat in a way that made him look somehow smaller, or at least softer. But even when he was leaning over to show her something on the computer, he would ask and apologize and leave space. She wanted to tell him that he was being unnecessarily cautious, but the truth was she appreciated it. Sometimes at work there would be too many people around, blocking the exits, and she would have to remind herself to breathe, remind herself that she was safe. Steve might have been the person she felt safest with, but the effort was likely worthwhile and even part of the reason why.

It was such a relief to be around him, but there were still pieces that were rough and awkward. They had between them several years different life experience, she in their native time, he in their adopted one. Years of grief and change and becoming different people, enough to be noticeable. Enough time to idealize each other, so that the versions of each other in their minds had gained a bit of a spit-shine, savvy enhanced and temper reduced. They might have been only a step or two different from each other instead of the miles that separated them from everyone around, but it still felt disruptive and unnatural, like moving everything on your desk an inch to the side.

And there was the part they didn’t speak about. The part where he would go home and leave Peggy feeling like his mistress. She knew that he was trying his best, and she said nothing to disrupt the tenuous balance of which Steve was the fulcrum. She was tempted, though. She was tempted to topple it all.

* * *

Three and a half months in the future- the present- and Peggy still found herself waking up with a hand already on the gun on her bedside table. It took her another few seconds to leave sleep behind and comprehend what her instincts already knew: there was someone outside her door.

She was up and waiting when the knock came a moment later. She held the gun at her side, loosely; she had already looked to see who it was.

“This place is kind of a hole, you know? You’d think Rogers would have sprung for something a little higher on the real estate food chain to stash his baby mama. But I guess cheap and covert are the buzzwords when you’re stuck in the Depression and have the morality to match.” Tony Stark said this all very fast and very calmly as soon as she opened the door. “I actually would have found out about the rugrat sooner if Rogers just ordered stuff off of Amazon like a normal slave to the corporate giant instead of picking stuff up from people’s fucking Craigslist ads. And if I hadn’t thought that it was impossible that he knew the touch of a woman. You were hidden better. Really had to dig to find you.” He stuck out a hand, meant to further disconcert her rather than a gesture of politeness. “And yes, I’m exactly who you think I am.”

Peggy smiled. “Your father was the same way,” she said, ignoring the hand. “Thought he knew everything when he really knew very little about what was important.” Then she slapped him across the face for being impertinent. Then she brought him inside for ice and tea.

* * *

“My dad’s been dead twenty years, and you clearly don’t have enough to spend to go under the knife. I hadn’t really thought he was into the under-ten set,” Tony said. He was holding the ice to his cheek, although Peggy suspected that his face had stopped hurting.

“Unsporting, I think, to make accusations of a man who can’t defend himself.” She drank her tea.

“You know what would be sporting, Mary Poppins? If you’d stop the cryptic and just fill me in.”

“Tony, think about who I am.”

“Margaret Carter,” Tony recited. He peeled the ice away from his face while he spoke. As she had suspected, he was just being dramatic. “Single white female of Brooklyn. Sweetheart, paramour, _lover_ of Steve Rogers.” He looked at her for a moment. She looked back. His eyes flicked wider. “ _Peggy Carter_? The same Peggy Carter?” He stood, walking the space between her squashy couch and small thrift store trunk that pretended to be a coffee table. “I thought it was just a weird fetish thing that he chose someone with the same name and the same look. ‘Here darling, pretend to be my long lost love. I’ll bring the period underwear.’ But you’ve probably got your own period underwear.”

“I’ve modernized in that arena,” Peggy said dryly. Unfortunately. They seemed to have lost a taste for support and cover in the intervening years.

“How the hell are you here though? Is there a secret subterranean freezer for you guys? Pull you out, warm you up when things are getting boring?”

Peggy sighed. Perhaps she should have gone for a sturdy mug instead of this smaller, daintier cup. “Think like a scientist, Tony.”

He looked moderately affronted at that. “Is there any other way to think? Okay, there’s no way they were up to time travel in the forties. You could be a clone, but you look like you’re the same age as when you disappeared.” There it was, the understanding coming on. “I lay my money on suspended animation.” Tony collapsed next to her. He tossed the ice onto the coffee table. “Why no records, though? Big mystery when you pulled that vanishing act. You’d think someone would have mentioned you were off doing your part for science. And if they’d had suspended animation up and running then, why don’t we have a big vault of immortal presidents and Walt Disney heads? Unless…” When he looked at Peggy, there was a little more hesitation, a little less insolence. “You fall victim to one of those classic pre-Nuremberg Code human experiments, Carter?”

Any fun she had been having, from a change in her routine, a new face, a joking voice, someone other than Steve with whom to discuss her secrets, had drained away. “They seemed to be far less interested in paperwork than most bureaucrats I know,” Peggy said.

“What about the kid? Was she before or...”

She gripped at her tea. The all-purpose English remedy, she and Monty used to joke. Apply liberally to anything from gunshot wounds to heartbreak. It didn’t seem to be working. “The suspended animation,” she said carefully, “was quite incidental to the experiment part.”

“Shit,” Tony said. It made her feel somewhere between better and worse that even he didn’t seem to want to make light of it.

“I agree.” Peggy put down her cup beside Tony’s melting ice. “Do you drink? Because I’d like something with a bit more fire to it.”

* * *

“Cap didn’t spill about you. Even after I found about Baby America. Just got that clenched up look when I asked and told me to stay out of it. If you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t really.” She could still hear the echo of him in her head: _anything I know comes with me to the grave_. “I trust Steve.” She did. They were very honest with each other. And yet she had seen him two nights ago and he hadn’t said a word about Tony prying into his secrets. She was faced with the idea that he could not tell her everything, not when she had asked for him to keep a part of his life from her.

“My dad looked for you. For years. Had to give up and focus on Rogers because you were such a dead end. At least he could,” he twirled a finger in the air, “circle a plane or a ship where he thought he might find something. You were the invisible woman.” Tony looked like he wanted to prop his feet up on the coffee table trunk. She lifted an eyebrow at him and he settled for swirling his drink instead. “He’d be going nuts if he found out. Both of you alive the whole time.”

“Not precisely alive.”

“Yeah, but the sleeping for seventy years part is a plus. Being awake through all that on top of the government sponsored pregnancy thing would be too much.”

For the first time, Peggy laughed about it. It was more of a snort, truly, unladylike and ridiculous, and she wasn’t sure whether it was the alcohol or being around someone other than her pleasant but clueless coworkers and heavy, gentle Steve with his endlessly patient silence that did it. But she found to her surprise that it was better than boxing it away. Her ribs felt expanded, just slightly.

“I can come up with codes and play with anagrams in my head, but that would wear after a week, much less decades,” she acquiesced, sipping from her glass and staring up at the ceiling.

“ _That’s_ what you do in your head? Howard wasn’t kidding about you being the brains and brawn package. He always said that he’d have wanted you to run SHIELD, back then.” Tony turned abruptly. “Want to come work for me? Not sure what you’d do, but I like having brains around.”

Peggy wrinkled her nose. “Is it a habit of yours to offer unspecified jobs to women who you’ve stalked and only just met?” She liked Tony thus far, but the attitude seemed fanciful. “And regardless, I already have a job.”

“What do you even do?” His tone made it clear that any job she named would be dismissed immediately.

“I’m a waitress in a lovely pub where you are never to think of showing your face.”

He put up his hands in reluctant surrender under her glare. She suspected he would come anyway. “Alright, but anytime you want to ditch the dead end, let me know.”

“One of the closest, nicest friends I ever had was a waitress,” Peggy said quietly. “Leave the insults behind.”

Tony stared at her. “Jesus, it’s like the two of you are made from Greatest Generation clichés. ‘Honesty is the best policy.’ ‘Good things can come in non-enhanced packages.’”

“Wait an hour between eating and swimming or you’ll drown,” Peggy said pointedly.

“The offer,” Tony said, finishing off his drink, “stands.”

* * *

Steve had texted her by morning. _I apologize. Tony just told me he found you. I never meant for that to happen._

He might be expecting anger, but she didn’t have any for him. And she knew why he worried, but she could not help but feel some relief in the new openness. _This is why I’m the spy between the two of us._

_I’m still sorry. Stay safe._

* * *

Tony was back the next night, handing her a half-eaten carton of greasy noodles as she let him in just after midnight. She had left the gun by her bed this time, but she did offer him a glare. Of all people, she suddenly wished that Miriam Fry were there to run him off.

“If I’d have known that Cap would start getting chatty once I mentioned your name, I never would have come. After he got over being pissy, I had to deal with the best of Peggy remix all day.” Tony went over to her secondhand laptop and started fiddling. He looked over at her. “Contract can be here by morning. I’d give you a company computer. Nice office.”

“A nice office where I could sit and grow dusty collecting a salary?” She put the container on the counter, brushing her fingers together although it was a useless remedy for the clinging oil.

“Nicer office than Cap, even.” Peggy snorted. Steve had mentioned sourly that his office in the Tower, while mostly just the place he stored his things, was suspiciously small and low- ceilinged, especially considering the dimensions of the rest of the building. “This would be dream territory for most people.”

“Offer it to some other people, then.” Peggy said. The truth was that she didn’t know what her dream was anymore. She had grown up with the war lingering malevolently in the distance. All her work had been built on it. She was no longer sure what she wanted or enjoyed, or if she had ever known. There was still a war now, international, interdimensional, but she felt hopelessly out of touch with it. Steve had been thrown into it by virtue of his serum-enhanced body and his inability to waste that advantage. Now that the secret was out, she supposed she could go poking around SHIELD for a job, but she suspected that the only one eager to hire a former special services agent who had missed several decades of world events was Tony, and his ideas regarding work did not match even her poorly-formed ones.

“At least come by the Tower. We’ll have a parade.” He made a final face at her laptop and came over to take the noodles back, digging out the chopsticks nested inside the container.

Worse than Bucky Barnes after a three day trek with only D rations, honestly. “Fine. I’ll add a visit to your ostentatious tower to my agenda. Now let me have the next few hours to sleep.”

His responding slurp had her snatching his food away and letting it clang into the trash can in an instant, leaving him standing with chopsticks jabbed out into the air.

“Don’t dare think about slamming my damned door,” she said, eyebrow raised and foot planted.

He looked at the trashcan and then at her, nodded, and said, “I’ll see you later.” She watched him toss away the chopsticks before seeing himself out, sighed, and went back to bed.

* * *

There was no parade. She presented herself to the guard at the front desk and then, in the elevator, to the automated version of Jarvis. Her jaw tightened at that. Reminders, mostly, and the fact that she wasn’t sure the man would have approved of his name lent to something so nontraditional.

As she walked out onto the floor where the Avengers had their offices, she felt the future truly smack her in the face. She knew that Steve had admired the speed and ease with which she had adjusted to the passage of decades, but much of that had been due to the situation in which she had last been. She had certainly not grieved the past in the same way Steve had talked about doing, and the fact that Times Square was all lit up or that there were cell phones which were portable telephone, camera, and library in one was far less troubling than being locked away. But this...it was like something from a film, or Howard’s imagination: light and glass and machines everywhere.

“Stark’s been whining about your lack of punctuality for almost an hour now.”

She turned to see Natasha’s wry, red-lipped smile. “No appointment was made, and 10 AM is a reasonable arrival time after a midnight visit.”

“Tony was at your apartment at midnight?” There must have been exercise equipment around. Steve came over wearing a stretchy t-shirt that featured a v of sweat by the neckline. He would have been working out strenuously to have gained it.

Peggy reminded herself that she had quite handily survived a world war, and that there was no reason to behave swoonily just because Steve was being very visibly attractive in front of her.

Peggy tried to forget that the world war hadn’t prevented just the same thing the first time around.

“Tony has some fundamental misunderstandings about appropriate time and space.” She nodded at Steve, her voice blessedly even. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too.”

“God, this is awkward. I think once you hit twenty years of being apart, a kiss is required.”

She spotted him as soon as she looked up: Clint Barton, crouched on top of what she had thought was just another floor-to-ceiling cabinet. She was losing her edge.

“It hasn’t been twenty years,” Steve said quietly. Something of an apology, she suspected, for not telling his team about her sooner. Not for keeping her confidence, but for his own omission, his lack of reciprocity when he asked them to trust him.

“Maybe so, but I didn’t want to get into the details. After fifty there’s gotta be tongue. Especially when you’re still looking at her like that.”

She turned away from Barton just in time to see Steve swallow, his throat level with her eyes. Her face grew smooth and taut, an old defense mechanism. Their relationship was intimate and unspoken and involved little in the way of traditionally considered romance. The fact that there had never been a direct discussion or agreement before he had crashed the plane or that they never made any declarations after he found her did not worry her. She knew how they both felt- he had the plainest face, the plainest heart, of anyone she had ever known- and she never considered that he might be interested in anyone else. But a true romantic relationship was impossible when neither of them would force the other to make a choice.

“I can’t say I’m impressed so far,” Peggy said to Steve. “The Commandos were filthy for the most part, but rarely so crude.” She locked eyes with him, a silent agreement to disregard the comment and what it brought to mind.

And Steve responded smoothly, “I’ll introduce you to Thor one of these days.”

“You think I need a mythical hammer to keep your boys in line?”

“I think you could keep them in line without getting out of bed in the morning.” Focused as she was on Steve’s eyes, his soft voice, Peggy could still make out Natasha’s quirked eyebrow over Steve’s shoulder. “But he has enough chivalry to make up for them.”

“Why Captain, I’m blushing. You always say the nicest things.” Tony came down a flight of stairs, hands in his pockets.

“But rarely about you.” Steve looked away from her to say it. She knew the movement meant that they were settling back into their mutual silence.

“Highest highs to lowest lows.” Tony tossed off the remark easily, coming over to stand facing Peggy. “I thought timeliness would be one of your virtues.”

“I wouldn’t be fool enough to say the same of you.”

He gave a shrug off her look. “I had to go iron out some wrinkles. The foundation- you know the foundation?- it’s got some stuff in the works but the director resigned and someone’s gotta grease the wheels. You’d think I’d have people for that, but I guess sometimes I have to liaise. Don’t worry, I’m learning all the moves: the ‘just get it done,’ the sweet-talk.” Clint snorted from up high. Tony held up his hands. “Hey, it’s on me. Unless you know someone else who’d be good at that stuff.”

It was painfully transparent, the kind of thing Tony would have thought up in the middle of the night, the kind of thing that Peggy had seen coming from the first syllable. But she thought about perches for Hawkeye and an office for Steve and the desire to keep everything safe under one roof.

“I’ll consider it,” she said. She checked her watch and looked around one last time. “But now I have to go. Lunch shift soon.”

She gave a bit of a nod all around. Steve asked JARVIS for the elevator. “Thank you, darling,” Peggy said, and leaned up and kissed him, lightly, on the mouth.

He was still frozen and she was still grinning when the elevator doors closed.

* * *

_Was cruelty always a feature of yours? I didn’t remember that_ , he texted her once she was already on the subway. 

_A kiss is cruelty now?_

_It is when you do it like that. I stayed still too long. There are pictures._

She laughed aloud, ignoring the glance of the woman in the seat opposite.

_A deficiency in your skills of reaction and subtlety._

_Those were never really my skills._ Then: _I really liked it, though._

They were likely going to have to talk about it now. The prospect, she thought as she went up to the street, was less frightening than it had been.

* * *

There weren't enough roads. It had been a problem during her time with the SSR as well, trying to plan how to get supplies to places that were cut off from everything or which lacked the space and support needed for all the personnel, and it hadn't gotten better in the new millennium. The Maria Stark Foundation was involved in long-term projects- education and disease research and such- but the more immediate relief work was hampered by the absence of infrastructure which circularly affected the communities most in need. 

“Tony didn't fire someone to give me this job, did he?” She looked up from the binder of information Tony had, in his stubbornness, sent over.

“Hmm?” said Steve vaguely. After a second he put a thumb into the book he had been reading on the other end of the couch. “I don’t think so. The director really did leave a few months ago, but I’m pretty sure that before he decided you needed a job Tony just handed out money and bet that it would be well spent. I know that Fury is in charge of ours, but I don’t know about the rest of it.” He sounded grumpily resigned to the mismanagement. Being thrifty and non-ostentatious came particularly naturally to him- sometimes she felt that his childhood had brought him up to be ready for rationing- but the idea of the funds that could make a difference slipping through the cracks because no one was in control was generally galling. She imagined the whole thing like a dripping sink: even a little here and there would add up to be a significant waste, and would eventually turn into quite a problem if someone didn’t come along to tighten things up.

She had to admit that for all its flaws and harebrained nature, Tony’s idea wasn’t an awful one. Logistics, control, making a difference- all things in her wheelhouse. She flipped through the overwhelming pages of the binder, glimpsing photographs, explanations of the various projects, lines of contact information, budget statements. There was one thing she hadn’t missed: paperwork.

“I can do this,” she said, not trying to convince herself, just factually determined. The traffic from outside nearly rushed over her voice.

From beside her Steve said, “Of course you can.” She half expected him to be answering her absently, back to paging through his book, but when she looked up, he was staring at her intently in the low light. 

“You didn’t do anything to make this happen, did you?” She knew that Steve was firm about letting people show their own worth, about not underestimating anyone, but she also knew that he used to drop dry socks or extra bits of food, things he felt that the serum had designed him to live without, into the Commandos’ packs on their longest marches. Six months after Steve had gone down, she had run into one of the USO dancers in New York, who had told Peggy fondly that Steve would quietly tuck chocolate bars into her pockets during that time of the month. He was empathetic, and when people wouldn’t mind it, when they were used to being loved, there was a bit of a caretaker to him.

( _A bit of a mother_ , she thought fleetingly, and pushed the idea away.)

But Steve just shook his head. “It was all Tony. Once he found out, he got a little…him.” Steve’s shoulders shifted back a bit, a soldier’s motion. He was about to say something sacrificial. “I’m sorry that he found out in the first place. I should have apologized in person before.”

“I appreciate that, but it’s not necessary. You work for an international intelligence agency. It was something of an inevitability that they would find that you were hiding someone.” It was actually a little alarming that it had taken so long. She was fairly anonymous, assuming Natasha’s fake identity held up, but Steve did visit with prompt regularity. And had he soundproofed his apartment and taken to coming and going via fire escape? Anyone with as much control over global safety should have realized within a week that Steve was no longer living alone. “And I should think it would actually be a bit easier now, wouldn’t it?”

“In some ways. I can straighten out my benefits paperwork with SHIELD.” He didn’t give her time to think about what he meant by that; her brain started anyway. “And I didn’t _like_ lying to them, even by omission.”

She curled her legs beside her so she could really face him, shifting the binder’s weight on her thighs and resting her cheek in a hand supported against the back of the sofa. “Were they angry when they found out, Tony and Barton? They didn’t seem it when I met them.”

There was a pause that in anyone else would make her think of stalling, of grasping for a lie, but she waited for Steve. “They were confused, I think. Keeping secrets like that doesn’t really fit into this image of me that they have.”

“‘‘Twas I who chopped down the cherry tree’ and all that?” It sounded accidentally Shakespearean in her accent despite her wry tone.

Steve grinned in a way that was startlingly unrestrained, making Peggy realize just how much it had all been weighing on him. She hadn’t seen that grin since early 1945, and it was shameful for it to have been hidden so long. “Tony might have been angrier that he didn’t intuit anything more than that I kept it quiet.” Peggy had known that already. She also suspected that there was a significant amount, including some fairly crucial things, that Tony did not intuit about Steve. “And he and Clint...they both understand wanting to be keep people safe. Even without the details, they understood that I wanted to protect the people I love.”

And then it was all bared, pressing on her. She couldn’t even think about the disappearance of Steve’s smile, its replacement with the tentative seriousness that was far more familiar. Because she knew, had known for years, exactly how he felt, but she had never heard the words. And now he was saying them, but it was not only about the two of them.

“You have a child,” she said, aware like pain that this was the first time in months that she had acknowledged it to him.

And Steve said simply, “Yes,” because he did not lie to her or coddle her, because he was a straight-backed sort of man.

“It’s all very complicated.” As if that didn’t sum up nearly her whole bloody life. She tilted away from him, placing the binder on the coffee table with a heavy, muffled sound. She wished to go back to that morning, to surprise kisses and easy banter, or at least for it to have lasted a bit longer, but she had learned that she wasn’t given such courtesies.

He did not catch her hand, but she thought he wanted to. “I love you,” he said, helpless, “the only way I’ve ever known how.” Completely, overwhelmingly, and in the midst of a situation beyond their control.

She felt at once very solid (Peggy Carter, brainy and brave and breathless) and very fragile (marks on her body, and a little person out there who she never wanted). More than anything she was tired. She did not want to have a competition of stubbornness with Steve, seeing who could hold out the longest, who would abandon someone first. She wanted to be herself, settled beside him.

“If I asked you to stay here, would you?” 

She did not like saying it, did not like the way his face fragmented and then tucked itself away behind a blink. She needed to ask anyway. “I love you,” he said again, this time like stone. “But you don’t need me.” The implication was clear: _she does_.

“If you think that to be the case, you’re more daft than I thought.”

Steve nodded. “That’s always been true. But what I said is true too. You’re stronger than any of us. You’re a survivor.”

The truth was very bitter, sometimes.

Peggy was tired. That was truth too.

Without thought: “Will you tell me something about her?”

He did not ask if she was sure, but he considered the question and his answer came slowly. “She wakes up early. She grabs my pencils when I’m sketching. She shies away from cats. She likes applesauce and avocado and baths and a book called _That’s Not My Dinosaur_.”

Peggy could picture it all in a nebulous way. And she found herself feeling nothing. Only distance, like it was a thought experiment, a story she was trying to make real to herself. “There will be no happy families,” she said slowly, “but I don’t...hate the way I once did.”

“I’m not waiting,” said Steve. There was a steely second of air between them before he began floundering the way she had first seen in the back of a car in Brooklyn. “I didn’t- I meant there’s no hurry. There’s no timeline or expectations or rush...there’s no rush!”

A smile came from somewhere despite the ice and the squeeze in her chest. “I don’t doubt you mean it, but this can’t go on forever.”

“I don't want it to,” said Steve, deep and determined and foolish. “But if this is what we have, I'll do what l need to hang onto it.”

And for a senseless, slashing moment she _hated_ him, because for all his words, all his love and protection, he was going to force it onto her. Intentionally or not, he was trusting that she would be the strong one.

“You start running they'll never let you stop. You stand up, push back,” he had told her once. She wondered for the first time if he was still the same man. He would not run, but at least in this he seemed to have forgotten how to stand.

* * *

She handed in her notice at the café a few days later. She had little intention of returning but saw no reason to be uncivilized about it, and when Tina, the manager, and Allie, one of the other waitresses, mentioned meeting for drinks sometime, it did not feel like a lie to accept.

There was a fine hesitation before she signed her contract with Tony. She would not miss being a waitress, really, but she wondered if a donated job was the best way out. She had her footing, here and now; perhaps SHIELD was beyond expectation, but finding something else that better suited her would not be so difficult. But the more she had read about the Maria Stark Foundation, the more she actually wanted to bite into their problems. And she had gotten nowhere by taking cautious half-measures.

She signed the papers. Then she had Tony advance her first paycheck so she could buy some proper clothing.

Later that week, Tony introduced her to Pepper Potts, who was back from a business trip to India and greeted Peggy with kind and welcoming suspicion. With most other people, Peggy would have dropped a few stories about how charming Howard had been back in the good old days, how she wished she had known Maria Stark, how she saw Tony as a kind of potential nephew figure, and added a few subtle compliments about Pepper’s wardrobe into the mix. But she guessed Pepper to be less easily manipulated.

“I’m very grateful for what Tony has done,” Peggy said, words clear and targeted. “There are people who would not even have tried to help me, much less succeeded.”

It wasn’t that Pepper was won over by a mutual recognition of Tony’s finer qualities. Really, Peggy thought as she held Pepper’s gaze, it had little to do with Tony at all. But whatever Pepper saw, she nodded, and told Peggy that they had an interior designer they worked with if she wanted to redo her office.

* * *

“I'm sorry, but your direct aid to overhead ratio is abysmal. Unless you improve by a significant amount, I'm afraid we'll be withdrawing our support.”

The man in front of her opened his mouth, no doubt to give his version of the _but without our support, the orphans/animals/veterans will have nothing_ speech. Peggy didn’t have the time or the patience. She held his eye and said, “Skip the staff retreat at the mountain resort, don’t have the showy fundraising gala this year, stop hiring your relatives to sit around doing nothing.” She looked away, leaning back into her chair and beginning to flip through one of the reports on her desk. “You’re a charity. Go help some people.” She heard him get up after she flicked to the next page, not brave enough to say anything but brave enough to be huffy. “Oh, one more thing,” she added when his hand was on the doorknob. She looked up, relaxed as a predator. “You’re a good figurehead, but you’re replaceable. I know exactly who I’ll put in your office if you pad your salary ever again.” She smiled into the still air between them. “If you’re going to embezzle from your own charity, best not to just move a zero over.”

She tried to keep reading the report once he had gone, but soon gave it up. She rubbed at her eyes, rolling her shoulders as she looked out onto the dark brightness of New York at night.

Her back was to the door when the knock came and she didn’t even bother to respond to it. Sonia knew when to come in, just as she knew that Peggy desperately wanted a cup of tea just then. She was a fantastic assistant, unlike the man Peggy used if she was working on the weekends, some kind of shared office help who Peggy called Charles, although she suspected that he generally went by some nickname, Charlie or Chuck or Chaz. Part of keeping Sonia was making sure she was satisfied, though, so Peggy made do.

Sonia set the mug on Peggy’s desk. It was a white one with black and red letters, the original message (“I’m not bossy, I’m the boss”) altered with a permanent marker to read “I’m bossy and I’m the boss.” It had been a gift from Barton.

Peggy took a sip and pressed her eyes into a long blink. Sonia waited until she had finished to say, “Captain Rogers is waiting outside.” Her tone was bland and factual, but Peggy saw the small, pinched place in her lips that meant disapproval. Peggy had gotten Tony to stop mentioning even their non-classified business in public fairly quickly, but information about her and Steve had spread through the Tower with a predictable yet distressing rapidity. The people Peggy interacted with most- Tony, Natasha, Barton- might have been Steve’s friends first, but they remained neutral regarding the tenuous relationship between the two of them. Sonia, on the other hand, was firmly in Peggy’s camp. She lacked the full story, but Peggy appreciated it anyway.

“Thank you,” Peggy said. She let the report fall closed, then stood. “I believe it’s the end of the day for us both. Please tell Captain Rogers that I’ll be out to see him shortly. We can leave together.”

Sonia nodded and left. Peggy absently faced the window again to finish her tea, staring outward. When she turned back to her desk, spots of light fireworked across her vision.

Walking out of her office she saw Sonia first, tall and broad and elegant, auburn hair still curled in a neat bun as if it weren’t long past the end of the normal workday. She seemed, Peggy thought, the kind of person who would have felt hopelessly freakish and awkward for several years before she realized she was beautiful.

She only noticed Steve because Sonia was sending him a very subtle frown. He was standing against the wall by a large, draping fern in a pot. He looked sooty and discomfited. The latter, she suspected was a combination of Sonia’s face, and Peggy’s carpet, a thick cream pile intended to impress those who recognized its worth and unconsciously intimidate those who didn’t. Peggy thought that Steve might fall into a third category. The smudgy marks around his face and neck were from a mission; she knew that SHIELD had sent him out of the country for the past few days.

“Everything alright?” She walked toward the door with her case in hand. He fell into step mostly beside her, moving forward to open doors and behind to let her walk ahead as needed.

“Fine,” he said, the way he did when things were not fine. It wasn’t that he was lying, but that he hadn’t yet realized that something was wrong. She brushed against his arm going through the next doorway and he inhaled slowly, pausing before he followed her to the elevator. They were in the lobby, giving distracted goodnights to the custodian vacuuming the rug and the guard at the front desk, before he added pensively, “I just needed to see you.”

They stepped outside and she looked into his wearied warrior face by the lights of the city, streetlights and headlights and neon. He closed his eyes and tucked his chin, and her palm went to his cheek easily.

“Were there children?” she asked. He nodded, skin rasping against her hand. He looked somehow gently animal, a large cat hiding its wounds. “Would you like to come home with me?” She had not meant to ask it, not with everything between them ready to shatter, not when she could still recall the pulsing of her anger toward him, for wanting to have everything and do nothing, even after several months. The words came out anyway.

Steve turned his face so his mouth rested against her palm, holding still there for a moment. “I want to go home with you,” he said, voice an ache. “But I have somewhere else I need to be.” He paused, glancing around before he looked back at her and said recklessly, “Would you come home with me?”

She stepped away from him. Her hand pressed against her side. “That isn’t fair,” she said. The words landed like bullets, clipped and brutal, but felt slow coming from her mouth. “I understand that you are in a difficult position, but your insistence that things will be better someday is misguided. There are no guarantees that things will ever change, and you’ve made clear what your choice would be if the time came. Perhaps the time has come.” She had survived Steve leaving her once. She would do it again.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said immediately. He had curved inward, hunched, ancient. “I’m sorry. I want everything. That was selfish. I’m sorry.”

“You said that you would wait.” 

“I would,” and she was sure that it was the truth, and that she needed to take it from him.

“The expectation is on me to change.” Peggy told him. “And that might happen years from now, but it might happen not at all.” She stood in front of him, boot-camp straight. “I carried your daughter for nine months. I never wanted to. And I might not wish her ill, but I don’t want to be in her life. Even if that means not being in yours.” She hailed a cab. “I have several late meetings this week. I’ll contact you later.”

* * *

Steve ran the miles home. The idea of cars felt condensed and awful. The run wasn’t long enough, but as he climbed the steps to his apartment he felt slightly more peaceful, or at least slightly numbed.

Thor was sitting in front of the TV as Steve came in, watching a Sesame Street DVD with his head cocked. 

“The young Lady Rogers is quite taken with this entertainment,” he said as Steve came in. “Especially the red demon with the impossible voice.”

Steve nodded. “Sorry about that.” When Ella was smaller, crankier, harder to settle, Steve had more than once fallen asleep in front of the TV with the baby on his chest, Elmo’s inane voice drilling its way into his dreams. “Was she alright otherwise?”

“You know it is always my pleasure to care for your offspring when I am able. She is sleeping now.” Thor picked up his coat and lowered his voice a little. “We may have left a mess. It seems she does not enjoy banana.” He clapped Steve on the shoulder and was gone.

Steve went to go clean up the kitchen. He worried less when Thor was available to babysit. He had built up a circle of people he trusted to watch Ella while he was away: for the first few months it had been a friend of Natasha’s whose past Steve hadn’t wanted to know about but who had actually been very good at his job. Now that things were, while not public, out in the open, he had more options. Darcy Lewis would sometimes step in if she was in the city ("I spend more of my time babysitting scientists and people from other dimensions. An actual baby is way less stressful”). Fury had, following a thorough chewing out for Steve’s failure to tell anyone about Peggy or Ella and some attempts at subtle questioning about how he had managed to keep them a secret, reluctantly recommended some SHIELD agents to watch her. Steve didn’t like taking them away from their jobs or expecting them to play nursemaid, and wasn’t entirely comfortable leaving Ella with them considering the testing they had wanted to do to him and would surely at some point want to try on her, but he needed people who would be in control if someone came after Captain America’s daughter, who would not be alarmed when she reacted to the sound of the radio that seemed barely audible from the next apartment. They took shifts most often, but Steve preferred Thor, solid all around, powerful and unphased and trustworthy.

There had been a time when he would take Ella to the Tower with him, but he had stopped once Peggy started working in the same building. He didn’t want to take the chance of Peggy seeing her. He didn’t think there would be violence, but he tried not to slap Peggy with reminders.

He had failed tonight. He was greedy and he had failed.

In small ways he succeeded nearly every day. He didn’t mention to Peggy Ella’s strong grip or her first steps. Unable to help it, he sent the rest of the team a minor avalanche of video clips of baby sounds that bore little resemblance to actual words; he never added Peggy to the list. But these were not victories. They were the basic things Peggy deserved. Peggy, who let him see her and let him come home at night too, who walked with daily, upright, iron grace. Who was owed the world, and only got him.

The kitchen was clean around him. The towel dangled from his hand; absent minutes had passed. Steve finally shook himself. He rinsed the towel and hung it up. He passed a hand over his face. He went to Ella’s room.

She slept like Peggy, starting out in a compact curl but stretching broadly as the night went on. She had been asleep long enough now that she had starfished over half the crib. Steve hovered a palm above her back, careful not to get the filth of it onto her clean pajamas; she was no longer dwarfed by his hand. He could not imagine a time when she wouldn't be his little girl.

She liked making messes but didn't like sticky hands. She already knew how to blink her big hazel eyes to get any of the Avengers to do what she wanted. She called him Dade, and patted his face when he looked sad. She was all of that and above it. He loved her like breath.

He had left Peggy before to save faceless millions. He knew he would do it again for just this one. He had known before tonight, but seeing the small, shattered bodies around him had made him more aware. He knew also that it would tear him up. Steve remembered freezing alone in the ocean. Leaving Peggy or being left by her, the splintering choice, would hurt infinitely more than the ice.

Ella stirred, hand clenching lazily outward. Steve froze. She settled again and he sighed. He knew he should leave her and sleep. He stayed, listening to deep breaths and feeling her living heat.

When Bucky died, Steve thought he had no family left. Now he had one and it was broken with terrible, righteous rifts.

He kept notebooks full of sketches of Peggy, of Ella, of the two of them together, and the fantasy made him sick with jagged longing.

The sky was touched with lightness by the time he went to bed.


	4. Chapter 4

Peggy had routines now, work and chores and reading, late nights boxing in the gym near her house, meals and drinks with Pepper or Natasha or Tina and Allie all jigsawing together.

She had not seen Steve for three weeks and though in some ways it was easier, it niggled at her like the missing piece.

She was out at her weekly scheduling lunch, sitting in the restaurant’s outdoor eating area with Sonia pencilling into a planner across from her, when something exploded down the street. Peggy began to jog toward the building even as she dialed 911. Sonia followed, heels crisp, but looking slightly less composed than Peggy had seen her. Peggy pressed a quick hand to her arm as she finished up with emergency services and looked around.

“Christ,” Peggy said, like a deflated groan rather than a curse, as she spotted the stereotypical black van parked in the alley, the getaway driver at the wheel looking at the windows of the building expectantly. “With the Avengers down the street. Hell.” That meant that whoever was inside the building lacked intelligence and foresight, was arrogant enough to think themselves too good to be caught, or was so desperate that it didn’t matter. All bad options: it meant recklessness, and Peggy didn’t know the situation in the building and how bad things could become.

Well, she would never know if she didn’t get in there.

Peggy didn’t even have to tell Sonia to follow as she moved toward the alley. They both crouched low. As Peggy came by the driver’s window, she stood fully, slamming her sharp heel through the glass. The driver barely had time to move even in surprise before Peggy had depressed her pepper spray into his face. She slammed his head against the steering wheel several times. He had a gash when he finally slumped unconscious. It had all taken a neat ninety seconds.

Peggy turned to Sonia. “Have the police come and collect our friend here. Then call the Tower, see if they aren’t too busy to lend a hand for containment of the situation.” Some blood had gotten on her wristwatch; she wiped it onto the thug’s shirt. “Stay here until the police arrive. He might seem concussed if he wakes up, but if he moves-” She went to hand over her Mace, but Sonia held up her own. “Excellent. I’ll be inside.”

She got in through a maintenance door. It might have been alarmed, but in the chaos, she didn’t think it would matter.

The first person she saw made her feel a little better. He was positioned at a corner with vantage points on both ends of one hallway, but absolutely blind to the corridor Peggy came quietly up. Deeply amateur. Still reckless, but perhaps easier.

She had an arm hooked around his throat before he was even aware of her. Even with his struggling, it took only a little over half a minute before he was on the ground. She relieved him of his weapon, and rifled through the pockets of his cargo pants until she found a handful of zip ties. She rolled him into a closet, then paused to stretch her shoulders. She had gotten lax in her training. More time and variety at the gym, then.

She climbed the stairs with the borrowed gun in her hand. The smoke from the blast was thicker on the third floor. She could hear sirens out the window, but wasn’t sure if that would make things better or worse.

She considered taking out the third floor guard with the butt of her gun, but he was a constantly shifting sort and it was rather a precision move, so she put her arm to his windpipe as well and left him zip tied.

The floor was mainly a loft-like workspace with computers and desks by the walls. The smoke was coming from near a vault inset in the wall at the far end, and there were a few chairs closer to the center. They were knocked over, and beside them were two women and three men. Two of the men- one tall and twitchy, one with a blunt head and a buzzcut- were standing with guns in hand. The others were kneeling on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” one of the women was saying, sounding shaky but dependable. “Our supervisor is the one with the password and she’s out at lunch. You can shoot us all, but the answer won’t change.”

“Let’s get out of here,” the man with the buzzcut muttered, but the taller one shook his head.

“We worked six months for this. I’m not letting it fall apart because someone needed her latte a half hour early.”

“You saw what happened when you tried to burn your way into the vault,” said the man on the floor. He was not, Peggy saw, wearing any shoes, nor was he holding up as well as his colleagues. Tears and mucus snuck down his cheeks and chin. “It’s impossible to get past the security measures without the password and we don’t have it.”

“You must have-” said the tall man turning even as he spoke toward the windows. They were frosted, but the flashing lights of police cars were unmistakable. He stared at them, and Peggy took her opportunity.

He fell, howling, as she managed quick shots to both of his legs. She went to do the same for the other man, but he had an arm chained around the male hostage, gun under his quivering chin.

“Stop shouting. You’ll have medical attention soon as long as your friend drops his weapon,” Peggy said, standing braced in front of them, blocking the hallway. The tall man made a garbled sound. There was quite a lot of blood on the floor.

“No!” There was hysteria in the other man’s voice. Not good.

Peggy made herself as soothing as she could while keeping her gun trained. “You wanted to leave. You wanted out, remember?”

“Out to where? The cops are right there.”

“I think that we would all prefer that you survive, even if it means going to prison, rather than dying because you refused to surrender.”

“No,” he said quietly, then louder, “No, no, no, this can still work. You can’t shoot me if I have him. So I want your gun on the floor. Kick it over to me. And I’m going to take this guy and walk out of here and we’ll all go home at the end of the day.”

Peggy could see the mark the gun made as it slid across the shined wooden floor. He picked it up awkwardly as he tried to keep control the struggling man in his grip, but he managed. He started walking away, keeping an eye on Peggy.

“Danny,” called the woman who hadn’t spoken yet. She was crying now too.

“Can’t you stop him?” said the other woman, getting to her feet with a kind of struggling calm.

“No she can’t,” said the man with the buzzcut, finally turning, triumphant, toward the hall.

Peggy’s first bullet caught him in the elbow. The second was to the leg. He fell, staring up at the ceiling, as Peggy walked over to pick up both of the guns. The hostage, Danny, fell too, shaking. His legs were tucked underneath him like a portrait of a picnic.

“I have blood on my socks,” he muffled out.

Peggy smoothed her skirt back over the holster where her own pistol, the one Steve had given her months and months ago, always sat. “We’ll get you new ones,” she said, and she went to find the police.

* * *

“We’re a startup,” the calmest of the three, Lilah, told Peggy later as the police escorted them downstairs. “We work on nanotechnology. Mostly for medical applications, and mostly design and theory, but we got a prototype in and I guess they heard about it, but...”

“I don’t think those guys were looking to cure anything,” said the other woman, Lindsey.

“Anyway,” Lilah said, “We were really glad to see you there.”

“ _Really_ glad,” Lindsey added.

“As long as you all came out alright,” Peggy said.

Lilah smiled and started toward her as if for an embrace, but her phone rang. “I’m sorry, my wife’s home with our toddler. She probably saw the news.” She stepped away to answer.

“Ma’am?” One of the officers- Rollins, his badge read- stopped Peggy. “Captain Am- Captain Rog- The captain is waiting for you.”

 _He always seems to be_ , Peggy thought. She brought Lindsey over to the paramedics first. She knew the way shock could be giddily covered by the aftermath of a skirmish.

Steve was standing by one of the police cars. He was in his civilian clothes, but had the shield with him, held low as if it were an accessory that he had realized too late was wrong for his ensemble. She saw Barton farther down the street, half sitting, half sunbathing on top of one of the fire trucks.

“Do I owe you a bottle of bourbon?” Steve asked, walking toward her.

Peggy startled out a laugh at the reference. “I think I’d prefer to see you make a daisy chain, actually.”

He smiled, both of them remembering a night in Poland, a marksmanship contest in which Barnes had placed first and received as reward the remnants of their bourbon, and Peggy, the second place winner, had been given nothing but a crown of daisies woven together- through muttered reminders about his having sisters- by Dum Dum Dugan.

Steve shook his head. “I’d end up with a handful of flower confetti.”

“You might need some practice for the future,” Peggy pointed out. The time between reminders was getting shorter: months at first, then days, now moments before a mention of everything between them. It still laid Steve silent.

Over his shoulder, Peggy could see the police barricades and media trucks. Sonia was speaking to a pair of police officers who kept peering over toward Peggy. Just from the set of her shoulders, Peggy knew her assistant was telling them that she wasn’t to be disturbed at the moment.

“I suppose the lack of police interruption was your doing?” she said after a pause.

“You were already in there,” Steve said with a shrug. “Better to let you work and get everyone out safely.”

“I was glad to do it. They had families. They deserve to get home to them.” She believed that, although she also believed in caution and lack of coincidence. She had already decided to look into the business in case there was more to it all than a simple technology robbery. Before she could think better of the question, she looked over at Steve. “Do you ever think about what would happen if you didn’t come home?”

“I never used to,” he said immediately, as if the thought were being skimmed from the top of his brain. “But now I worry all the time.” He stared forward. “I have accounts set up. I have a will. I know that you’ll take care of yourself, and that Nat and Clint and Tony will try their best. But I don’t want her growing up without a family. And I’m terrified of what could happen if the wrong person decided to come after her.”

It might not have been the first time the thought had occurred to Peggy, but it was the first time it had any hold: she had not been the only one beyond control down in those deep white halls.

Down the street, Sonia stepped back. The moment was over. Two police officers came toward them. “Ms. Carter?” said one. Peggy had to stop herself from snapping at him that it was _Agent_ Carter. “We need to take your statement now.”

“Is it true that you busted that guy’s window with your heel?” blurted the other officer.

Peggy smiled. “Yes. And now no one should ever badger me again about the practicality of my choice in footwear.”

When she got into work the next day there was a bottle of bourbon and a vase of daisies waiting for her on Sonia’s desk. _Sorry it isn’t a crown_ , read the note. _And just so you know, it isn’t the practicality that concerns me as much as the distraction._

She managed to keep her smile small in front of Sonia. She still waited a few days before she reinitiated her meetings with Steve. When she saw him again, it was comfortable.

And yet everything felt like a precipice now.

* * *

_Sorry, something came up. Can I see you tomorrow, or do I wait until Friday?_

Peggy stared at the text. Apart from when missions required it or when she requested it, Steve had never missed coming to see her. She had come to depend on it, actually.

 _Whenever you can find the time_ , she replied. He could interpret that as he wished. But then, because she reminded herself that he did have a job that involved some danger, _Should I have an eye on the news?_

Long moments later: _Nothing earth-shattering. Figurative or literal._

_Are you alright then?_

No answer. There was a knock. Even without the text, she would have known it wasn’t Steve. She went to look through the peephole, and swung the door open.

Natasha examined Peggy’s relaxed shoulders, her neutral face, the light from the phone screen shining through the knit of her sweater pocket.

“At the ER,” Natasha said simply. “Ear infection.”

“Steve?” Peggy neatly raised an eyebrow, keeping herself very carefully unstartled.

“No.” Natasha held up a broad-based bottle. “I thought we could do something instead.”

Pepper, approachable and collected and open, probably would have been the more likely choice. Peggy opened the door and let Natasha inside.

* * *

“Everyone gets therapy these days,” Natasha said. Peggy did not have a balcony, but they had placed chairs beside the open window, letting in waves of dense spring air and the sounds of New York.

“SHIELD doesn’t make it a requirement?”

“They made me go to a couple sessions. Didn’t stick.” Natasha shrugged and drank, her hair swishing against her shoulder. She leaned toward Peggy. “I don’t think they tried very hard.”

Peggy took her turn with the bottle. She waited for a breath. Natasha’s choice of alcohol felt like falling. “What would you have said?”

“Can’t manage the work-life balance. Have a hard time connecting with people. The usual.”

“Perhaps you were too textbook for them.” Peggy kept her face straight. Natasha looked over at her with a bit of a laugh pressing around her mouth.

“I should have told them that I once had to spend two weeks engaged to an oil billionaire who liked to be spanked and it left permanent scars on my psyche.” Peggy snorted, handing over the bottle.

“Impressive.”

“There was another time,” Natasha said after a minute, the words coming slowly. “Another mission. The target...he had a thing about my breasts.”

“Hardly the first time, I’m sure,” Peggy said.

Natasha did not smile. She had the bottle between her palms, face toward Peggy, but she looked disengaged. Peggy sat up straighter, feeling foolish. “He kept holding a knife near them. Kept asking if anyone would look at me without them. If anyone would love me.”

“I hope,” said Peggy, slow and clear and crisp, “that you took that knife and made him eat it.”

Natasha gave her a grin. It had teeth. “I stay on mission. That came later.”

Several hours after, Natasha’s bottle finished and one of Peggy’s down to the swirling dregs, the two of them moved to collapse on Peggy’s bed after the chairs got to be too difficult, Natasha said, “I never thought that it would be easier to be who I am in this business, but I wish- sometimes I wish it didn’t mean a mile-wide target.” There were plenty of things she could have meant- being a double agent, moving between the Avengers and SHIELD- but Peggy thought it was something more fundamental. Natasha spoke absently to the ceiling, hands on her belly. “It can be an asset, a strategy, but there are days I wish it wasn’t the first thing anyone saw.”

“Twice as hard,” Peggy said, not without bitterness. “Half as much.” In certain respects, not much at all had changed between the centuries. Too many men still saw the same things when they looked at her: curves and curls and weakness, made to be used by them. It was never how she saw herself, and yet it was this perception which had gotten her here. She leaned up a little, drained the bottle, let it fall onto the mattress beside her.

“I was never much for that burden shared business,” said Natasha. Her voice was fading. Peggy wasn’t sure whose drunken exhaustion it was due to. “But maybe in this case…”

* * *

In the bleary dark: “Why have you done so much to help us?”

A pause. “Because I can’t remember a time when I wished someone would help me.”

* * *

Tasha was gone when Peggy woke up. Her note, fluttering from the breeze through the still-open window even as it rested underneath the emptied bottle, read only _Good talk._

* * *

Peggy went for a run the next Sunday. When she had first started the practice, it had reminded her of the boot camp drills that were still only a few years removed from her memory **,** but now it was just a part of her routine, the stretch and the outdoors.

It was already mid-morning, the streets crowded. Peggy ran through to the park hoping for more room on the paths. A gorgeous day all around, and there were crowds around the park, too, tourists and families enjoying the weather.

She heard them before she saw them: helpless little girl giggles bubbling over themselves, followed by a man's laughter, lower and fond and familiar.

She took an account of them, unthinking and automatic. Steve wore a baseball cap and blue jeans, a plain white t-shirt, not the khakis and neat button-ups she usually saw him in. No one you would look twice at, and certainly not Captain America. The girl was dressed in a polka dotted shirt and red leggings, a clip clinging bravely onto a section of her wispy brown-blonde hair. She looked healthy, and about the right size for her age, but Peggy's heart jumped when she saw her collapse from her toddling steps into Steve so that he toppled over. But she saw in the next second that it was just feigned, playful falling, an excuse for tickling and more laughter, and that was when she truly grasped it all for the first time. They were a family. Steve was a father.

* * *

They went to the grocery store together when Steve came over a few days later. They did things like that sometimes, washed dishes or fixed her showerhead, confined acts of domesticity trying to stretch themselves into a full life. She knew that he preferred shopping at farmers markets, but late Tuesday nights were not an ideal time for them.

Peggy had a basket over her arm with a few staples tucked inside. For all that food in the twenty-first century was more overwhelming and often less flavorful than what she was used to, the options for single women who had no desire to cook were excellent. Steve’s cart was jumbled with a variety of items, boxes of pasta and bags of produce, enough to hopefully satisfy his appetite for at least the week. She could see brightly colored cartons and containers meant to appeal to children mixed in: cereal and yogurt and chicken nuggets. Steve, she noted, had chosen the dinosaur shapes.

“I saw you in the park on Sunday.” For all her delicacy, she still sounded abrupt. Steve tensed. “It’s alright,” she said. He watched her for a moment before motioning for her to lean back so he could reach across her for a bottle of apple juice. “You're very good with her.”

Steve laughed softly. “You should have seen me at first. I was a disaster. There were plenty of babies around the neighborhood when I was growing up, but I never really bothered with them. And then on the USO tour, people would just stick their kids in my hands and expect that I would know what to do. I had no practice. When I first had to hold her, I was sure I was going to crush her by accident. Natasha kept giving me pointers, even though I don’t think she had much more experience than I did. She was just better at faking it.” The way he spoke was like a door opening, an almost giddy outward stretch.

She said nothing, maintaining a blank face for long enough that he moved back, moved on, segued clumsily into something innocuous about Tony’s latest shenanigans.

They walked to the checkout. Peggy went through first, waiting for him on the other side. Steve allowed several other people to go between them, either out of his normal courtesy or embarrassment at the thought of them having to wait through the amount he was buying. He took a truly improbable number of cloth bags from his pockets and started to place his groceries neatly inside.

The heat was breaking as they walked outside. There were still people around, and Steve drew momentary glares from passersby because of his unwieldy cargo. He mostly ignored them.

They reached the point where they had to divide. Steve looked as if he were going to offer to help her home, but she reminded him with a twitch of her eyebrow, a shift of her lips, how difficult that would be considering the amount he was already carrying.

“Sleep well,” he said instead.

“Goodnight.” She lifted her bag to her shoulder and stepped off the curb. Two steps across the street she turned around. “Steve.” He turned back to face her. “I’d like to meet her,” she said quickly. “If that’s alright.”

He did not ask if she was sure, but looked dry-mouthed as he said, “Of course it’s alright. Um…” He shifted one of his bags, almost hitting a passing man. Peggy held her own bag tighter. Steve was usually so careful of the space he took up, it was strange to see him disconcerted. “I’m having a party. Saturday. At my place. It’s…” He looked like he wanted to do something with his hands, one of his nervous touches, but they were too full. “It’s her birthday.”

Peggy knew she didn’t know the date, that she had avoided knowing things like that. She was still surprised by it. She squared herself, pistol-ready. “What time?” she asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more weeks of posting left: one final chapter, and an epilogue.
> 
> There's a scene in this chapter that I was very iffy on, but as I was preparing to post I started thinking about the feedback I've gotten on this story, how accepting everyone seems to be, and how appropriately and carefully you've interpreted the story so far. I've been truly overwhelmed with not only the number but the thoughtfulness and quality of the reviews I've gotten on this story. I know that this story is based on an extremely difficult premise that has unfortunate echoes in our real world, and I _deeply_ appreciate not only your kind words, but the respect and consideration with which you approach your comments. Anyway, thank you all so much.


	5. Chapter 5

A dream:

She stood by the shore without anyone around, just herself for miles and miles and it was absolutely peaceful and the loneliest she’d ever felt. The sand began to absorb her feet like tears. It crawled up her ankles and there was nothing to be done.

* * *

A dream:

The fire lit her with the exact warmth that meant Christmas holidays at home. She turned a page in her book, looking up to smile at her mother.

Mum smiled back like an embrace. “I’m so glad you decided on a family.”

Indeed there were several small children playing on the carpet. They looked up with monster’s faces and she began to scream.

* * *

A dream:

The fire lit her with the exact warmth that meant Christmas holidays at home. She turned a page in her book, looking up to smile at her mother.

Mum smiled back like an embrace. “I’m so glad you decided on a family.”

Indeed, there were several small children playing on the carpet. They looked up with small, sweet faces and she began to scream.

* * *

A dream:

Explosions in the background and the surrounding darkness didn’t break her concentration as she sewed up an injury. She hummed a little, something about going home soon.

“It’ll be alright,” she said, and by sparking light she saw that she was sewing up her own self, still and pale and gut-wounded.

* * *

A dream:

Familiar white corridors surrounded her and she walked endlessly, endlessly, until finally she reached a doorway. It was covered in glass, with everyone she knew standing on the other side, and even as she pounded at it, no one could hear her. Steve looked up once, but saw nothing and looked away again. The glass would not break.

* * *

A dream:

A mess of knitting sat in her lap, and she tried to untangle it, unweaving patiently for hours and hours without result, until she thought she had done it and found herself holding her own heart, pulsing perfect in her hand.

* * *

A dream:

She came to awareness of weekend drizzle and no plans, and so kept her eyes closed, feeling the warmth of the bed, the heated, peaceful presence of people at her side, at her back.

“I am so glad to have you,” she thought with a cozy drowsiness, and slept, and woke.

* * *

A dream.

* * *

“It’s not the right time,” Steve said. She stayed quiet, instead sliding two fingers beneath the collar of her pajama top, tracing her slowing heartbeat. He had been calling nightly, saying it was too fast or unfair to her, as if he had forgotten that she had asked. “I thought it would be good, to have people there, but it’s too much.”

“I will see you on Saturday,” she told him, steely-jawed. She hung up, and stared at where she knew the ceiling was. She hadn’t thought that the city could be this lightless, a pure, windowless black.

* * *

Steve’s table was covered in gifts. A large portion of them, presumably from Tony, were large and brightly papered, including several emitting muffled noises, but she also saw a more sedate gift bag that looked like it might have come from Natasha, and even a box wrapped in fabric that made her think that Dr. Banner had come for the occasion or at least sent something along.

The apartment was crowded when she let herself in. The Avengers, including Thor, were all there, but so were a number of people Peggy had only met once, or had heard about from Steve’s stories. She recognized Colonel Rhodes, something sharply military about him even with the polo shirt and grin, and Maria Hill, chatting gamely with a couple who Peggy thought might be Steve’s neighbors.

She spotted Steve with his back to her near one of the windows, and stood for a moment, watching him. He smiled at the man he was talking to- another stranger whose identity Peggy couldn’t even guess, tall and grizzled, a sleeping child in his arms- and gestured with one hand, a superfluous beer in the other. And then, before Peggy knew she was ready, he turned toward her, guided by instinct or a shift in the room or a glimmer in the glass.

He returned her gaze, his drink absent in his hand. He said something to the man beside him, took the child and held her.

Peggy had options. Pepper was nearby, eyes watchful even as she spoke to Jane Foster. Sliding into their conversation would be easy. The door was feet behind her, within quick reach. Steve would not stop her.

She walked toward him.

“I’ll see you,” the tall man said, clapping Steve’s upper arm and brushing past Peggy as he stepped away toward the food Steve had laid out.

“Who was that?” she asked Steve.

“Martin. He used to watch her in the beginning.”

Peggy watched Martin push back the sleeve of his leather jacket to check his watch. “Does he belong to a motorcycle club?”

Steve gave a wincing smile. “He’s ex-Special Forces. I think.” Peggy raised a brow at that. “Natasha recommended him. I didn’t have a lot of choice back then.”

She was likely going to say something back- there was plenty of material with Martin- but before she could, the little girl in Steve’s arms woke up, nestled slightly against him, blinked, looked at Peggy.

“Cups,” she said, very clearly, curling the gray cotton of Steve’s shirt into her fist.

“That’s right, sweetheart,” Steve said for no reason Peggy could understand, brushing his finger against her small hand.

Peggy watched the curve of it, their skin overlaid, felt that little fist take hold of her breath. She remembered that hand, smaller, swaddled.

Everything smelled blindingly white.

Her legs moved her quickly. Not a tactical retreat, calm and practiced. Nearly a run.

“No,” she said, and left.

The memories came anyway.

* * *

There was no bus stop near the old post road, so Peggy walked the six miles from town. It had been late when she’d arrived there, and it was an absolutely egregious time of night when she climbed the porch steps and knocked.

She tracked the progress of lit windows, the house coming to dimmed, creaky life. She took a breath just as the door opened.

“Carter,” he said.

“Gabriel,” she returned, and stepped inside.

* * *

The kitchen was familiar; she had been there a week last time, so she knew where to find everything necessary for tea.

Jones was sitting in a faded armchair, worn patches just where his elbows rested and his shoulders pressed back, evidence of a familiar, lengthy relationship between them. Peggy put the cup on the table beside him and took her own to the loveseat facing.

“I’ve seen her before,” said Gabe. “Rogers has brought her by.”

Although she had already told him, Peggy said, “The first time for me,” against her cup.

“Why did you decide that the time was now?”

She looked down, conscious of the clock ticking into the quiet. “Because she is real. She’s real and Steve will never leave her and,” she pressed a thumb against her cup, the heat searing in, “I want to stop living this half life.”

Jones peered at her sharply. “Nothing to say that you couldn’t go take yourself away, live it all without any of this.”

“I think that after all that’s happened, I owe it to the universe to at least try with him,” Peggy said with straight shoulders.

“Carter, I saw four kids through every crisis known to man so I know a thing or two, and that was some top level foolishness.” He leaned back, a laborious process that all sounded like a sigh. “You don’t owe anything to the universe or to the captain or to anyone else, and I think you know that.”

“He has- He has my whole history.” She peered into her cup, beginning to feel a bit chipped around the edges. “If I leave, if I start over somewhere else, I’ll never for the rest of my life be able to tell anyone about anything that has happened to me. Even if I one day found someone to trust, my story is too unbelievable. I would be branded a liar or a lunatic. Leaving would mean that all I’ve built and all the truth I have will be lost.”

He made a weighty pondering sound in the back of his throat. When he looked at her, his eyes had a shimmering, sympathetic kindness, even as he said off-handedly, “You remember my girl, during the war?”

“Diana,” she recalled.

“Diana,” he confirmed, his voice still evening-draped just saying her name. “A library of knowledge in her head, and a smile that could light me home. We’d gotten engaged just before you called. She gave up her family, her studies, and her name to come live here with me. Should have been a doctor- and you know how rare that was in those days- but she ended up filling in for the biology class over at the high school.” He looked down at his hands as if he could cup that regret, that worn bitterness, in his palms. “She passed after six years here. And it was the loneliest time in my life. Some days I thought I would scream because I could never talk about the brothers I lost, the things I’d done, because I would never even hear my own name again.” Peggy could feel the hollow pain of his words in her chest. “But I married again. Celie.” He said her name with a smile, candy sweet. “Could keep a town in line and make them laugh the whole time. Didn’t know the truth until the day she died. I still loved her to the last minute. You were a spy once, Carter. You know how to live with your secrets better than I did. And you’re also the woman who lost Rogers before and survived. You would be able to be happy if you left, I truly believe it.”

The sitting room was crowded, full of furniture, and heavy paneling, and a deep fireplace. She glanced around at everything, feeling the closeness of it, before she looked directly back at him. “I don’t want to leave. For myself. I want to stay with him.” Her voice was sure and quiet. She felt bruised and soft and weary. It was terribly difficult being iron all the time. “I love him. I want a life with him. I might not owe it to someone else, but I owe it to myself.”

Jones made to lean forward again, but the years scrolled with him and she did it instead, holding his hands in hers. “It would be one type of strength to leave behind everything you’ve made, and it would be another to stay and make a new kind of life even with all your memories.” He smiled at her, the broad, quiet smile she remembered so well. “No one who loves you will think any less of whichever choice you make.”

She was filled suddenly with the power of it, the roads that she could move herself down, the whole of space open for her living.

* * *

It was late bordering on early, days later, when she arrived again at Steve’s door. He had called and texted since she had left, seeming careful about it as if to give her space, although she suspected that when she returned to her apartment she would find that he had been there too. But she had chosen to come here without warning, to see him in person. She knocked and stood shaking, clenched her own fist, and breathed.

He opened the door and stood uncertainly in the gap, and they watched each other for a while.

She tilted her head, hair making a soft sound against her silky collar, and Steve opened the door wider and stepped aside.

“I’d like to see her,” Peggy said simply. “I’d like to try again.”

Steve nodded, and she led them through the apartment to the only room that was left.

The crib stood against the wall, slight, steady breathing coming from it. Peggy stood looking within; the figure there was not unfamiliar to her anymore, even in sleep.

When the thought came to her, it felt new, although she did not think it was: she deserved her anger, her rejection of everything that reminded of her of what she had been forced to, but perhaps she didn’t want it all anymore. She did not love the small person in the bed, and even indifference came and went within her, but the pain, the hatred, was so heavy. She wanted to leave this piece by the side of the road, to perform exorcisms, to construct a solid home for all of them in her heart.

“She has your damn ears,” Peggy said quietly, and she grasped Steve’s hands in hers and for the first time in longer than she cared to consider, she began to weep.

* * *

They had slept beside each other a half dozen times before this point- brief naps, and collapsing battlefield rests surrounded by the Commandos. Peggy was not sure whether she did not remember or had never known what it was like to do it like this, in a bed, for a full night. Steve was incredibly warm and liked contact, and when she woke, she found herself stretched over him, the covers kicked off and clinging to the bottom edge of the mattress.

 _We’re going to have to come to a better arrangement than this_ , she thought, and then flicked the thought away. Planning on hope would break her.

Steve’s body was blocking the clock, but the light told her it was still early. She could hear some soft snuffling sounds across the apartment. She poked Steve in the cheek; he gave a flinch, his neck moving automatically, and grunted a little, catching her fingers.

“She’ll go back to sleep,” he said, gravel-voiced, eyes still closed. He relaxed back into the bed, and although Peggy didn’t mean to, there was warmth here, and comfort, and between one breath and another she was asleep again.

When she woke later in the morning, babbling had replaced the snuffling and Steve was trying to slide out from under her. He stopped when he saw that she awake, stilling himself as if she might have forgotten their realities and he didn’t want to remind her.

“That isn’t going to work,” she said gently forthright. “And I’m going to go home now.” She stood, watching as something folded in Steve’s eyes. She stretched her shoulders and took her sweater from the day before off the chair. Steve had gotten to his feet and stood clear-eyed beside the bed by the time she turned back to him. “But perhaps you could send me some pictures. And maybe tell me a story or two during the week.”

She knew it was the right choice not because Steve smiled at the words, but because while there was some anger and a definite fear within her, what she felt most of all thinking about seeing Ella again was peace and possibility.

* * *

Getting ready for bed that night, she had thought that going into work the next morning would be like entering SSR headquarters from the bombed out streets of London, the feeling of haunted relief. But she found that her morning had an absolutely even-keeled normalcy to it, as if no change had occurred at all. Sonia had done the appropriate handling and rescheduling and smoothly mentioned nothing about the sudden need for such measures. Peggy settled back into her office, into her life, and if not for the occasional picture of small hands playing with small toys or waving a pair of socks, it would have been as if nothing had changed.

Tony and Pepper invited her over dinner several weeks later, a meal which involved excellent food and half interrupted conversation as they each took turns dealing with work crises. Pepper’s took the longest, and when it was done she propped her chin in her hand, took a sip of wine, and said briskly, “I win, I suppose,” before deciding they were ready for dessert.

It was ten before Peggy left, declining an extra molten chocolate cake to take home and embracing them each, holding Pepper’s eyes with a wordless sort of gratitude. She took the subway home, leaning against the window; she did not even notice the text until she was on the street by her apartment.

 _If I have to read Moo Baa La La La one more time, this book is going to have an unfortunate accident._ He had accompanied the message with a picture of the book in question, a cardboard version with a pale blue-green cover and teeth marks on one corner; the picture, and his mild exasperation made her smile.

 _Only unfortunate to some apparently_ , she texted back. And then, because she had slept in Steve’s bed, had heard soft child-words from the next room and had not faltered, because she knew her anchors and they felt solid, because this was her life and she was seizing it, she wrote, _I thought perhaps I could come over to yours tomorrow evening instead?_

Before she had even opened the door to her building, her phone buzzed with an answer: _Yes._

* * *

She went straight from her office to Steve’s apartment, deciding against going home to switch her emerald and cream work dress for something more casual. As determined as she was that she would not change her mind, she was moving from her domain to one unfamiliar, and she wanted to maintain a firm grip on the confidence from her day.

Steve called a “Come in!” as soon as she knocked, which seemed ill-advised; criminals might not knock politely but salespeople and missionaries would. But she let herself in regardless, walking through to the small kitchen. Steve sat at the square table there, facing toward Ella. She was in a bright red plastic baby seat, directing a spoon of mashed potatoes toward herself with vivid concentration.

For all that it had taken to get herself to here and now, the evening actually felt fairly simple. Steve had made an adult dinner- chicken, and their own potatoes- and they ate, all three of them. Afterward, Steve wiped Ella’s hands and face, changed her into disconcertingly small pajamas, and put her to bed. When he returned, Peggy was curled on his sofa with a collection of Agatha Christie stories. He placed himself beside her and took a sketchpad from the side table, rubbing a thumb against the tip of his pencil for several minutes before he began to draw.

Peggy nearly shivered, it all felt so normal. Normal for them, as if they were in her living room as usual, but normal for anyone, really, as if it could all be wiped fresh.

The next time she came over to Steve’s reminded her well enough how much that was not the case. She was never sure afterward what exactly Ella had done- waved an excited hand, or made a noise- but Peggy ended up counting her own breaths.

She hated that, being out of her own control. Hated the way her senses would betray her, the way her thoughts became a fence, trapping her somewhere she wasn’t any longer.

When she was small, her mother’s brother Walter who had fought at the Somme had come to live with them. Uncle Walter, peppermints and fairy stories and shadowed eyes and midnight walks up and down the creaking halls whispering, “Buried, buried,” as Peggy lay in her bed and wondered who exactly had been left behind.

And then she had grown up, had been in war and its aftermath herself, had seen brash, hardened people weep through clenched teeth and generals sprinkle vomit onto their decorated chests. She knew the ways that trauma could change the involuntary mind, that this was no issue of simple willpower, and she knew that Steve would never judge her for it. Still, she judged herself, because she had decided in her mind that Ella should not bear her hatred for what had happened, she had decided on this life, and part of her still resisted.

“We don’t have to do this,” Steve said one night, looking at her with that sprawl of affection and admiration on his face that just made her straighten her spine because her instinct was to soften.

“I do,” said Peggy, a cup of tea warm and straightforwardly fragrant in her hands, “if we want to have a life.”

“If it’s too much, maybe you shouldn’t try.” He ran his thumb around the rim of his own teacup. He hadn’t taken a sip. “I think- You would- It’s probably healthier. If you stopped seeing us.”

Peggy tilted her head at him. “Perhaps. But that is not the decision I’ve made. This is what I have settled on trying. If I change my mind in the future, I’ll tell you.” The words were so logical, all neatly aligned. She wished life could echo them.

Steve looked at her for a moment. “Alright,” he said. “But there’s no rush. There’s time.”

* * *

It was definitely a commentary of some sort that Peggy was not terrified for her life when she woke with her fingers on her gun and the hand of a former Soviet spy on top of hers.

Peggy flicked her eyes over Natasha, adjusting to the dark of her against the night. “Steve?” She knew a million tones to the question. This one, fear and crystallized calm bound together, was one of her least favorites.

“Let’s go.”

Natasha’s car was low-slung and very fast. She kept the windows open. Peggy wrapped her sweater a bit tighter as the world went by in a rush. “How bad is it?”

“He’s alive.” It was somehow less comforting than a list of injuries would have been. Peggy had seen that face before, on an army doctor in ‘44 who had just removed twelve bullets from various parts of Steve’s body even as his skin and muscle tried to close around them and he had fought the medics deliriously, without enough anesthesia to keep him down. Natasha hid it better, but it was the sort of face that said “it’s a miracle” and “there’s no miracle big enough” at the same time.

Pepper was waiting for them at the Tower. She wore loose sleeping pants and a tank top covered by a drapey sort of sweater in violet, similar to the cornflower blue one Peggy had on. Her hair slumped to one side. Although the casual dress was not unfamiliar, the sight of her relative dishevelment was a jarring enough reminder of the current situation that Peggy commanded herself to keep her grip.

“The doctors are almost done, I think. JARVIS says it won’t be much longer,” Pepper told them. Peggy nearly swayed because if they were finishing with Steve so quickly, it either meant that there was little they could do beyond what supersoldier healing would already accomplish, or that they were giving up.

Natasha placed a hand on her arm, for attention rather than comfort. “He’s already been in there for a few hours. I didn’t come get you until they said he was stable enough.” Peggy nodded, refusing to think of a reality where he never stabilized, where he slid away from her without a goodbye.

“Come on. We can wait in here,” said Pepper, leading them out of the hall and into a small room with bland carpeting and simple, straight backed furniture and pale walls. Peggy had never been on this floor before, but knew that it had been outfitted for the (frankly inevitable) occasions where Tony or one of the other Avengers was injured. As much as she trusted it to be well-equipped medically, she might have decided on a different design scheme for this waiting area; just walking into the room made her want to pace out again.

Still, she stood her ground, or rather sat, choosing a chair facing the room’s two entrances, unsure through which news would come if it did not come from JARVIS first. Pepper and Natasha sat on either side of her, although they kept their chairs far enough from each other that the armrests did not even touch. Peggy almost smiled at that: the three of them from different places, all with the same instincts for support, and the knowledge that it might not be welcome, that remaining firm and focused was sometimes the easiest way to push forward. Part of her still wished for Angie, her effortless warmth and openness, in a way she hadn’t in a very long time.

In the staring silence, Peggy did not think of Steve. She thought about how even with the lights bright, she could still feel the midnight in the room.

Tony joined them several minutes later. He was wearing one of his innumerable band t-shirts, and the wrinkles in it actually made Peggy feel more normal. But he also carried a sleeping Ella in one arm, a backpack the same shade as Peggy’s sweater but decorated with cartoon puppies slung over the opposite shoulder.

Peggy had not even stopped to think where Ella was in all of this. All those months of avoiding thinking about her had worked; when the world narrowed, Ella was cut out of it, and Peggy found herself oddly hoping that one day, this would not to be the case.

Pepper stood to take Ella, but Tony held on, handing over the bag instead. “Had to fill out paperwork in triplicate and wait for the,” he paused to mouth the word _fucking_ , although the only people awake wouldn’t have minded hearing it, “SHIELD notary before the agents would let me take her, so I think after all that bureaucracy I deserve to keep the princess, here.” His arms, gentle and secure but with a bit of a tremble to their grip as he looked at Ella’s relaxed face, told a different story.

It was half an hour more before a woman in a green surgical outfit came through one of the doors. “We fixed the injuries we could, considering the extent of the internal damage,” she said, with a tone- straightforwardness, a lack of excuses, and a bit of pride- that Peggy had used when reporting to generals. “Captain Rogers’ medical history indicates that given enough time, he should be able to heal. For now, he’s resting.”

When they were taken to Steve’s room, Peggy saw that this had been the polite way of putting things. Steve was attached to intravenous lines and monitors, seemingly comatose. Half of his face crushed inward beneath his oxygen mask, she could see burns down the side of his neck, and his arm was immobilized.

“Maybe we should…?” Pepper murmured to Tony, moving between Ella and the bed and starting to crowd him back into the hallway, as if Ella was awake and could be affected by anything they were seeing in the room.

“No, you know that Cap here sometimes gets lazy,” said Tony, eyes fixed on the bed. “He needs some incentive to get better and get his ass out of that bed.”

Peggy placed a finger on the lump in the covers that was Steve’s knee. “What happened to you?” she asked quietly.

“A house fell on him,” Natasha said. Her face twitched quickly into a hollow wince as she stared at Steve. Everyone waited, but she didn’t say anything more.

“Agent Romanov and Captain Rogers were on a mission of hostage retrieval after a SHIELD operative and her family were abducted,” said a voice. Even without the distinctive eyepatch, Peggy would have known the man, with his long coat and calm menace, as Nick Fury.

Natasha seemed to take this as permission to go into more detail. “We’d almost gotten them out. One of the kids was being held in the basement. After Cap went down to get him, one of the kidnappers admitted to me,” her mouth tilted and Peggy understood that the admission was not entirely voluntary, “that the house was rigged to blow.” Her mouth descended. “He couldn’t get out in time. We found the boy under the shield, and Cap crushed on top of them, trying to hold up the building.”

“Jesus,” said Tony. “What a dramatic son of a bitch.”

Peggy pressed her lips against the emotion in her throat, unsure if it would have come up as a laugh or a sob. “Things have changed,” she said, “less than one might think.”

* * *

She cancelled her schedule the next day, although it ended up being slightly useless. After she had gotten tired of the sound of her own chatter, there was little to do but watch the nurse check Steve’s (consistent) vital signs and eventually give in to the temptation, not unexpected after her middle of the night wake-up call, to fall asleep.

The door opened almost silently- it was possible that the Tower had never heard of rust or creaking hinges- but it woke Peggy nonetheless. Natasha entered, Ella balanced on one hip. She held a satchel with the SHIELD insignia in the same hand, keeping one arm free. Peggy was on Steve’s left. Natasha took the chair on the other side of the bed, shifting Ella to her lap, and passing the bag to Peggy across Steve.

“Fury knew I was bringing this one for a visit and he wanted me to give you those,” Natasha said. “Steve’s things.”

Peggy recognized the subtext: anything of import to SHIELD had already been removed. His cell phone was not even in the bag, although Peggy doubted that Steve kept anything sensitive on it. While Natasha tried to contain Ella, who kept reaching for Steve’s nasal cannula, Peggy looked to see what had been left behind. There was only Steve’s wallet, a small sketchpad that he took along when travelling, his iPod, a couple bags of the peanuts he used for quick nutrition after missions, and, in the bottom corner of the bag, his compass. Her breath pulled inward; she hadn’t realized that he would still have it, after the wars and the water and all that while.

Ella reached for the compass. Peggy startled, not because it was her, just because her focus had been broken. “Look, cups!” Ella said brightly, and Peggy remembered her saying it the first time they had met.

“Compass, _malyutka_ ,” Natasha corrected in a clear voice as Peggy popped open the top, improbably still working, and found her own face staring back at her, improbably undamaged.

“Daddy, it’s a cumps,” Ella said, petting Steve’s forehead. Peggy was struck by the odd realization that the little girl might never have seen him asleep in a bed. She was still young enough that he came to get her in the morning.

“He’s sleeping now, sweetheart,” and Peggy was surprised that it was her saying the words. She had never been natural with children, even before all this, even when it was not this child. During the war it had been Monty, uncle and godfather to dozens, and, when he remembered to watch his mouth, Dugan, who dealt with comforting the lost or injured or orphaned when necessary. And the instinct made even less sense now, without Steve to gently ease things, with just her and Ella and the anonymous walls surrounding them. But perhaps for the first time, Ella seemed very young and very human to Peggy. She was just a little girl who missed her father, another person who missed Steve and wanted him to open his eyes and be well again. Peggy looked at Ella, and Ella looked back. “We’ll show him the compass when he wakes up,” Peggy said quietly, and they sat together until Natasha took Ella for her nap.

* * *

Steve remained stable and sleeping, healing quietly and invisibly according to the doctors, so Peggy couldn’t justify taking more time off to sit by his bedside doing nothing. She had interviews lined up to add some middle management positions to the Foundation’s corporate structure. Doing the work would be easier and more effective if they had employees in different regions so their beneficiaries didn’t have to travel to meet with her in the Tower, and she didn’t have to rely on third-hand reports to ensure their money was being well spent. It also kept things running more smoothly if it was not a one-woman operation where the one woman might need to take some time off.

She spoke to Steve about her work during her twice daily visits. Tony had designed an application and installed it on her phone so she could keep track of Steve’s vital signs and any reported progress, but she far preferred seeing him and sitting beside him, although he gave her fewer outward signals than Tony’s app.

The others rotated in and out whenever they had a chance. Tony came by frequently, partially due to proximity, but also because he had been raised on Howard’s grandiose stories of Steve’s power and invincibility. Peggy knew from experience that when Steve fell, he fell hard, and while it was a difficult thing to see, it felt necessary to ensure that the familiar features, the solidness of his body, even unresponsive, were still there. Thor came by once, squeezing her hand with giant gentleness she appreciated and speaking about how proud he was to fight beside Steve, and Barton showed up after the fourth day, dust on his shoulders and scruff on his face that told her that he had been on a mission, likely far away. He sat beside the bed and read the paper, occasionally trying to verbally nudge Steve back to consciousness. She knew that Barton was the backup tactician and leader for the Avengers as he was, aside from Steve, the only one with sufficient military expertise from Earth and something approaching the right temperament. She also knew that Barton, used to sniping silence and solitude, was not looking forward to the position at all, and she found herself laughing at his attempts to rouse Steve before his promotion became a necessity.

Pepper stopped by, playing gracious hostess but also making sure that Peggy was doing alright, was eating and sleeping appropriately. Fury came briefly, at odd hours, and Peggy stared back at his watchfulness with shoulders back and chin raised because he made her uncomfortable.

“He’s wanted to talk to you for a while,” Natasha said, without Peggy even mentioning it to her. “Cap’s been convincing him otherwise.” Peggy understood the subtext there too: she had wondered why Steve was constantly leaving on SHIELD work when he had someone to care for at home, and now she had her answer. It came down to her, to his giving himself away to Fury in exchange for her getting to live her life. It would feel useless to yell at Steve just now, so she caught Natasha’s eye instead because Tasha did not take betraying Fury lightly, and she had taken on that burden for Peggy.

Natasha was busy, as always, but she visited when she could, sometimes with Barton and sometimes alone and sometimes with Ella. They each brought Ella with them on occasion, and Peggy got the impression, more clearly than ever before, that Ella was a part of all of them, knitting them together in a way even shed blood could not. Peggy was their friend, someone who had their respect and affection, but Ella was their smile, their second chance, and they did not cocoon her from Peggy the way Steve did.

On Barton’s third visit, he had Ella on his knee like a cross between a kindly uncle and a ventriloquist, telling her, Steve, and, peripherally, Peggy about the best burgers they had to try in the city. Before he had gotten halfway down the list, his phone rang, and he was saying, “Fu-” before looking at Ella and changing it to “Shit!” instead. He hung up and swung to his feet, passing Ella into Peggy’s automatic arms before anyone could comment.

“She likes The Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” he called as he left the room at a jog, and Peggy found herself alone with Ella for the first time, and uncertain about whether he had been serious about the spider.

“Well,” she said. Ella looked at her. Peggy was fairly sure she was holding her right, but it was the first time for that, too. At Steve’s, Peggy never touched her, mostly sitting nearby and making polite conversation when she could, just breathing when she couldn’t, working to expel the associations, while Steve took care of all the playing and changing and feeding. She tried breathing now, and found it easy, disrupted only by a wriggly Ella grabbing her sleeve, sharp fingernails against Peggy’s wrist.

“Here,” Peggy tried, reaching Steve’s iPod from his bedside table. She navigated to his most played songs, which was a mix of music from their own time and more modern choices, smiling as she selected Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. Ella began to bounce on narrow legs against Peggy as the music started, apparently familiar with it, and the laugh that lighted out of her made even Peggy smile. “You’re going to be quite the popular young lady, with your ancient taste in music,” Peggy said, and sat back in her chair, just her and Ella and Steve, breathing in the same space, until Peggy had to go back to her office.

(She still smacked Barton the next time she saw him for being insensitive.)

* * *

Ella began to get bored with sitting in Steve’s room. Peggy was actually surprised it had taken that long. When she was so young, life must seem like one endless day, broken into bits of eating and sleeping and playtime, and Steve must seem like the laziest person (thankfully) alive, refusing to wake up.

Pepper told Peggy one night, over food from the Thai restaurant that had once been Pepper’s favorite but now was their mutual choice for shared dinners, that none of them wanted to let Ella go back to Steve’s apartment to be watched over by SHIELD agents. She didn’t directly say that they wanted her to be with family, but Peggy could hear it anyway. She curved peanut sauce from the side of her mouth with her pinky fingernail, and was surprised to hear herself offering to watch Ella for an hour the next day. Even more surprising, she didn’t think of it as a repayment to Steve, or a necessity to sharing a life with him; she just wanted to know Ella.

She found that the little girl could play quietly on the carpet in Peggy’s office for between four and seven minutes before she maneuvered herself over to greater, more interesting, and typically more dangerous adventures. (Peggy soon learned not to keep open containers of water anywhere accessible.) Her vocabulary was relatively large, but she had problems with pronunciation that had her asking for “hog dogs” frequently, and she said “up!” and “mine!” with such stubborn vehemence that Peggy saw Steve clearly in her for the first time. She had a stuffed polar bear she spoke to with a weighty, nonsensical tenderness. Her hands flipped the flaps on her board books before Peggy even read the words, and she liked to compete at hiding from Peggy, giggling as she scampered away even when they weren’t meant to be playing.

They avoided perfection, because this was reality and there were moments, still so many moments in their visits, when, between one breath and a labored second, she began to shake, and she had to thrust Ella at a politely startled Sonia, shut the door to her office, and hold her own hands.

And still: she always went back.

One afternoon, Ella fell asleep warmly against her chest and it struck her how much this little girl trusted her, and how much she wanted it. It wasn’t that she had forgotten the things that had been done to her, the ways she had been hurt, the ways that Ella represented that. It was that she realized how much they deserved this, the two of them. So much broken- Phillips and Monty and Dugan, Steve, Gabe Jones who would have been a professor but instead retired after fifty-two years with the phone company- and she could try to fix this, to do this. They deserved a life, even if it was not the one she might have imagined or wanted, and she had decided to give them one.

* * *

She missed the first time Steve woke up. Tony’s app informed her, but by the time she got to Steve’s room he was gone again, truly asleep this time rather than unconscious, although it looked the same.

The next time he opened his eyes, it was breaking morning, slate clouds moving aside for the pale creep of sunlight. The room had large windows showing off the skyline, likely Pepper and Tony's decision when they were redesigning the Tower to make up for Fury’s shenanigans last time. Peggy could see the contained panic as Steve’s eyes flicked open, and she shifted a bit in her chair so his focus would be drawn by the motion. He looked at her and she nodded, reassuring.

“Just over two weeks,” she said. “Seventeen days.” She knew better than anyone what it was like to close your eyes and find yourself having missed the decades you were meant to have lived. “Which is remarkable considering that you broke precisely the same number of bones in the course of your heroics.”

He winced, shifting gingerly. “Feels like more. Bones, at least.” And then he was facing her fully, seeing her whole, and he froze.

“Yes, well,” said Peggy. She held a dozing Ella against herself. “We’ve discussed it and we think you should scale back your work for SHIELD. Decrease your chances of injury by quite a lot.”

“You’ve discussed it?” Hope and fear reached together from him, awareness of all the history and the pain, and even of the fact that his change of status with SHIELD would affect her.

Peggy maintained a mock solemnity, although it covered a bit of real sobriety and her own fear. “She was very clear. All three of us should be together for a long time. And as you've raised her to be as adamant about getting her way as I am about getting mine, I imagine it would be quite futile to ignore her.”

She knew what Steve's next response should have been, a wry remark about his history with futile missions, but instead he began to cry, body loose, swiping at his eyes.

“Steve,” she said gently. “It’s alright.” She reached around their daughter to squeeze his hand. Love gripped at her heart. “We're all here now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Peggy plays is Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters singing [ Pistol Packin' Mama](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjgqQcKE3DY) (on the nose, probably, but I've never been accused of subtlety).
> 
> As always, I appreciate the investment and the comments, which are still largely very kindly phrased. However, because I am obtuse and a confused bumblebee of a human being, if you do feel that you need to leave con-crit, I would appreciate if it came with some kind of statement of purpose- how do you hope that the information will be utilized? Thanks so much!


	6. Epilogue

Sometimes Peggy had to tell herself that Ella wasn't her daughter. Not the way it sounded- Ella was _hers_ , and Peggy loved her like the victory of a ten mile run, a successful mission, a battle well-fought, and would protect her with everything she had- but just sometimes, she would need to separate the baby she'd been forced to bear beneath the ground in 1947, the one Abigail held and Peggy refused to name, from _Ella_ , who gave uncoordinated kisses and liked to scribble her own “work" beside Peggy at their dining room table in the evenings.

Steve knew what to do when it happened. Back at the beginning, he'd left her alone, sure that she wouldn't want her vulnerability to be apparent. Now he would put something on the TV to keep Ella occupied, and come and sit beside Peggy, his hand over hers, his voice by her ear to calm her clenched heart.

Sam Wilson, Steve’s friend who he had met while running, had known none of this and still ended their first breakfast together by giving her his card and suggesting the two of them talk over lunch together sometime. Steve had her beaten, though: four minutes after their meeting, Sam had subtly suggested that Steve stop by the veterans’ hospital where he worked. Peggy knew that Steve had gone a few times, though he said that he hadn’t actually said much. She still put little stock into talking away her problems, but she liked Sam and had nevertheless considered going to speak with him; she still kept the gun Steve had given her on her bedside table.

All of that felt far away, though, as she and Steve and Ella climbed the stairs from the Metro into the daytime brightness. Peggy slid on her sunglasses and led the way to the courthouse.

“See, it didn’t take long,” Steve said from over her shoulder.

Peggy did not dignify that with an answer. It was true that the trip from home had been convenient, taking just over a half an hour even with the rush of people headed to work, but the real problem was Steve’s absolute refusal to buy a car. The look on his face when she had suggested it had only been rivaled by the one he made whenever someone mentioned Ella going anywhere near the motorcycle he still owned.

“We’re going to spend thousands to sit in traffic when there’s a perfectly good train that costs a couple bucks a ride, and will still take Ella for free?”

“Oh, and I’m sure if you spoke to them, they would offer you a senior discount as well,” Peggy had said dryly.

She knew that if it were really a problem, if being underground or around all those people bothered her, he would have bought her a car for every day of the week. As it was, their little arguments, Steve’s relentless patience scrolling back to reveal his crotchety flaws, just reminded her of all they had now. Disagreeing about money and groceries and vacations felt new and luxurious.

“Watch it!” Steve said, smacking a hand onto the hood of a cab that had edged against the crosswalk. His other arm had scooped Ella up and held her as high and far from the car as was secure. “My little girl here, Jesus.” He gave Peggy a preemptive look as they reached the sidewalk, knowing that she laughed whenever his accent managed to find its way out, then turned to Ella. “You okay, Ella Bea?”

(For several months, Peggy had assumed that this nickname was a reference to a middle initial, a B to reference the best friend he would always miss, but eventually had discovered that he had actually allowed Natasha to choose the middle name. Neither one of them was sure why she had selected Bea, but Peggy thought it a lovely name, if one that was going to change.)

“It’s okay,” Ella said, leaning to give Steve a butterfly-bright kiss on the cheek though she had to tuck herself under his baseball cap to do it. Steve still tried to travel incognito, although the news that Captain America had a daughter had become public around the time they moved from New York to Washington, something Peggy did not see as a coincidence.

The story they’d prepared was that she had been orphaned in an incident the Avengers had dealt with in Transia and that Steve had bonded with her there and adopted her afterward. The choice of location- distant, somewhat rural, technologically out of touch, with poor records and a creaky bureaucracy- was meant to stave off attempts to confirm or refute the story, but several news outlets had used it as an excuse to complain loudly about why he had not adopted a needy _American_ child, while others had gone on about the colonial mentality involved in foreign adoptions. So far the lie seemed to have worked for its more important purpose, however. Perhaps because of Steve’s reputation, or because anything approaching the true story was laughably far-fetched, there had been barely any theorizing, even counting the dark, murmured corners of the internet, that Ella was Steve’s biological child. It actually helped that residents of Steve’s old neighborhood had seen him living alone with a little girl for months, keeping it quiet with the classic mix of New York protectiveness and disinterest. She was still in danger because of her connection with Captain America, and they were very careful about anyone getting ahold of her DNA, but the potential for Ella to be used for any sort of supersoldier experimentation seemed less of a concern now.

They had gotten to the courthouse with plenty of time, but the security line took long enough that they walked briskly to get their appointment. Protocol and pragmatism dictated that they should not keep the judge waiting.

The worry turned out to be for nothing. There was still another person waiting before them, so it took fifteen minutes for the receptionist to nod them into the chambers. When they got inside, the judge behind the desk, a distinguished older Latino man with a neat silver beard, was competent and soft-voiced and kind.

“Well,” he said, putting on a pair of rimless glasses to read over their paperwork. “This all seems to be in order. You’re just here for the name change?”

“Yes,” said Peggy, heels together and back straight.

“Good, good. It’s an excellent choice.” He gestured to his own name plaque. “My parents made the same one. Now.” He put down the papers, took off the glasses, and looked at them. Steve had put the baseball cap inside his back pocket while they were in the waiting area, Peggy’s hair was pinned back from her face, and Ella stood at their feet in the parrot-bright dress she had picked out, but the judge gave no indication that he recognized any of them as something other than his delayed 9:45 appointment.

Not that Peggy really expected to be recognizable. They’d managed to avoid Ella being photographed, and although there were pictures of Peggy from the war and the days of the SSR, her covert work meant that they were few, and her disappearance meant that she had become a footnote that people did not connect to Steve in the modern day. In another life she could imagine museum exhibits of her own, but in this one she was somewhat glad to be invisible. The judge just looked at them mildly. “Do you avow that the information in these documents is true and accurate?”

“I do,” they said at the same time, although it was a lie. Ella’s name and birthday were correct on the paperwork, but even the year was according to her chronological age rather than the year in which she had actually been born. (Even Fury had been reluctantly impressed, if stiffly seething, at Natasha’s forged paperwork, some of which had even been integrated into the official SHIELD versions.)

“Then on this day in the District of Columbia I do approve the amendment of this birth certificate and affirm that my friend here,” he smiled at Ella, “will be officially named Ella Bea Rogers-Carter.”

He shook hands with Peggy, then with Steve, offered his palm to Ella for a high five that she delivered with enthusiasm, and showed them to the door.

The whole appointment took about twenty minutes. On the way back to the train, Peggy held one of Ella’s hands and Steve held the other, and the three of them ended up at the park near their house. Peggy and Steve sat in the grass, half reclined against each other, watching their daughter run herself into giggles, and occasionally holding up a hand so she could deliver something small she’d found on the ground- a rock, a granola bar wrapper- to them.

At one o’clock, Peggy stood, dusting herself off. “You’ll bring her to her appointment?” Although the signs that Ella had inherited any serum enhancements were so far minimal, limited to slightly faster growth and stronger senses, and just a touch more mental and physical strength than average, they had Ella checked with a SHIELD doctor every few months.

Steve looked lazily up at her, squinting against the sun. “We’ll be timely. I always like to see Fury try to pretend he’s unaffected by that face.”

“Have her to play ‘got your nose’ again, and I won’t bother you about folding your clothes for a week.”

“I’ll get video,” he said eagerly.

Peggy walked to meet Natasha in a casual bar nearby that could do several dozen amazing things with chicken. Tasha was still based in New York as much as she was based anywhere, but she visited Washington regularly enough, and went out with Peggy or Steve every few months.

They ate out on the patio by mutual agreement; the restaurant had a lovely indoor area with a wall of windows letting in the sun, but they both preferred the lack of glass and the clear circle of sightlines, even if it meant increased exposure.

Lunch was uneventful despite their watchfulness, quiet laughter and exchanged stories about Barton’s determination to beat Natasha at video games and Peggy’s latest attempt to convince Sonia to relocate to DC, no signs at all that they had the histories that they did.

“You should come over to the house sometime,” Peggy said as they prepared to leave. “Ella’s beginning to think you’re just her imaginary friend.”

“Then she has something in common with a Spanish duke and several members of the Chinese Ministry of State Security,” Natasha said with a smile. Peggy raised an eyebrow, not at all fooled.

“I thought it might be better to make myself scarce. You have your life now. You don’t need a friend hanging around anymore.”

Peggy knew that it would be useless to tell her outright how foolish a notion that was. “Perhaps not,” she said with a piercing look. “But we’ll always need our family with us.”

“Next time,” Natasha conceded, and Peggy nodded and left to catch the train.

They had moved to DC because Peggy had started to shift the Maria Stark Foundation’s goal from merely being the bank of worthy causes to trying to change US policy regarding those causes, and in person in the capital was the best place to lobby. Peggy spent a few hours in her office putting together statistics on homelessness for a meeting she had with an intransigent senator the next week, though she knew that force of will would probably go further in this case. Better to have information prepared, however, as she already had the willpower at the ready.

She checked her texts on the way home: one from Pepper congratulating them on their meeting with the judge that morning, one from Tony with his congratulations and a promise to hold a party for them soon ( _Theme to be weird family units. I’m thinking costumes. Me and Pep=Mulder and Scully w baby William_ ), another from Pepper with _her_ promise that any party would be small and would not involve costumes. Picture from Steve of him and Ella with what seemed the entire contents of their kitchen on the table in front of them, captioned _Playing restaurant_. Picture from Barton, a bird’s eye view of what looked to Peggy like Russian soldiers on patrol, three of them surreptitiously picking wedgies, captioned _crack squad_.

_I’m sure they’ll accept your donations of better fitting uniforms_ , she sent back absently. _Whoever put together your latest bruise-toned ensemble will surely have some input._

His reply- a picture of his middle finger that she thought was just one of several dozen already saved on his phone- came as she climbed the steps to their house and she smiled as she let herself inside.

Steve had cleaned up since his earlier text, and had dinner nearly ready. Peggy sat at the table with a glass of wine while he finished.

“How’s Nat’s ankle?” he asked, not looking at her. Steve had truly cut back on his work with SHIELD after his injury, spending most of his time with Ella, although he made tactical and preparatory contributions and went out on the major incidents handled by the Avengers. Peggy knew that it weighed on him, his abilities lying dormant while people died, while his teammates got hurt, as Natasha had been on a mission several weeks before, but it was what their family needed right now.

“Full range of motion,” she told him, and he nodded, shoulders dropping a little.

Over dinner, they talked about the latest in her work- Steve had met the senator before and had some suggestions about tone and presentation- and he showed her a video of Ella grabbing for Fury’s nose while he tried to keep a straight face that had her shaking with laughter.

“Did the doctor have anything to say?” she asked once they were washing to dishes, Ella playing by herself in the next room.

Steve shook his head. “Told me again that if there were going to be physical signs, they would probably have been there from birth, and that the latest blood samples look the same as ever, more like yours than mine.” They traded a glance. Peggy could imagine having worked for SHIELD back at the beginning, her and Howard slipping around below the radar, but the way it was today- global, internationally sanctioned, yet secretive and iceberg deep- concerned them both. They had Banner or Tony double-check Ella’s blood regularly to make sure that they had all the information.

Peggy had also been examined by SHIELD, months after Steve was injured. Fury had reported that they had found nothing out of the ordinary.

“Of course not,” Peggy had said with calm bitterness. “I was there to be a passive incubator. Enhancing me in any way would have been counterproductive.”

Fury laid a hand on the files Natasha had brought from the facility. “Seems like you didn’t need enhancements to cause trouble.”

Peggy thought of blood and bone in her mouth. It still made her smile.

She had considered testifying against the men and women who had held her. Though there were legal gray areas because the Nuremberg Code had not been established at the time, kidnapping had no statute of limitations. But even a quiet, closed trial would have drawn inevitable publicity that she could not afford, for Ella’s sake and for her own, and she was not even sure of the outcome she wanted. One of the men, an orderly, had already died in the past year; few of those remaining would see the next, and almost none would be alive after five. In the end, Fury had pulled strings and placed them under house arrest, their crimes vague but public. Peggy had visited each of them just once, seeing their faces, letting them see her smile, before she walked out and left them there.

“Peg,” said Steve quietly. “You alright?” She had let the water run too long.

She turned off the tap and looked around at their kitchen, its white walls and red curtains, at their daughter talking quietly to a stuffed bear nearby. “I am,” she said, and smiled at him.

Ella was difficult to put to bed that evening, squirming and scrambling away from them, laughter turning into a tantrum when she realized they were not playing. Finally, the room hushed in twilight, Peggy found herself on her bed with Steve, Ella nestled heavily between them. The fan cycled overhead in dizzy circles.

“Do you ever think about what we’ll tell her when she’s older?” She turned onto her side to face Steve. “The adoption story is public, and the name change will be on record.”

“We’ll tell her the truth,” said Steve.

“As enamored as I know you are of the principle,” said Peggy, “I don’t know that I want to have to tell it to her, even once she’s old enough for discretion. What would we say? That she was something beyond an accident, that she was born from science, that I couldn’t be a mother to her for years?”

“Yes you could have,” Steve objected, eyes open with compassion, with his amazement in her, but she shook her head.

“No,” she said forcefully, “I couldn’t have. If I had forced myself at the beginning I would have been the worst mother in the world. I would have ended up hating all of us. So I waited and let you shoulder it.”

“If you’re going to blame yourself again,” Steve started, anger quirking the syllables irritably.

“Hush, please, Steve,” she said. When he went mutinously silent she continued, “Sorry, darling,” sounding only barely as if that were the case, “but I’m trying to have a revelation and I don’t really have time for your affirmations, as lovely as they undoubtedly were.” He propped himself up on an arm and let her speak, although his eyes remained just slightly narrowed. “I needed to wait. I needed to put my life together. And I needed it to be my choice to come to you both.” It was the hardest, bravest thing she had ever done. It had taken her over a year to give up her apartment. She had a routine for when she found herself in the middle of the night shaking from a nightmare. Nothing was perfect, and there were days when she had to keep choosing consciously, had to give herself reminders and draw strength, to anchor herself with the way Ella grinned as she sang all the wrong words to the songs they put on, the times Steve would take her for a romantic night shooting in the forest and kiss her breathless when she’d bested him over and over.

“I’m glad you made the choice,” Steve said. He placed a hand onto Ella’s back between them. Peggy watched it rise and fall. She put her hand on top of his, lining fingers and knuckles and pressing gently against him. Realistically, she knew that her life could have turned out well, that she would have had less, or at least different, pain had none of this happened. But here, with the three of them in their home together, it seemed, if not worth it, enough.

“I am too,” she said, and it was true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Meaning of Bea](http://www.babynamewizard.com/baby-name/girl/bea)

**Author's Note:**

> I am in many ways uncomfortable with having written this, and don't want any future readers to be shocked by what they find in here. Comment with any tags or warnings you think might be added (e.g. were Phillips and the Commandos major character deaths for you?).


End file.
